RUM and WIndows Desktop Application Monitoring

[sharad_yadav]

Hello,

We have a requirement to monitor a thick .NET client application running on several hundred windows OS machine. We plan to use RUM for monitoring the thick client application.

However, the requirement is also to monitor Windows desktop applications such as Outlook, Internet Explorer, AntiVirus installations & top host metrics such as CPU, Disk and NIC performance. Please note that monitoring of desktop applications is limited to amount of OS resources they are consuming.

Questions -

1. Does RUM require OneAgent to be installed on the Windows host?

2. Is it possible for a RUM enabled Windows host to provide OS usage metrics for other desktop applications (such as IE, Outlook, etc.) ? The requirement is no different than using Task Manager on Windows.

Thanks,

SY

[Julius_Loman · Accepted solution]

For thick application, the correct approach is to use Dynatrace OpenKit and instrument the thick application manually - typically every user interaction and also subsequent network calls, etc. In this case you don't need any agents to be instaled on the client workstations. You only need to add the openkit library to the application and add the OpenKIT API calls to the application code. This is typically not a quick process and it must be carried out by developers of the thick application.

For other applications, such as Outlook/AntiVirus/etc. Dynatrace might not be the right tool to do the job and it is not an endpoint monitoring tool. Installing OneAgent on the workstations will work and cloud-infrastructure mode is sufficient and it will provide OS and process metrics and some insight into how applications processes are running. However, yon't have any accurate end user experience visibility and depending on your license - it might be costly even if your are running it in cloud-infrastructure mode.

If your apps are by any chance distributed via Citrix - there is now a GA support for Citrix monitoring and end-user experience for all applications distributed via Citrix. See more here.

[sharad_yadav]

Thanks for answering my question so very quickly.