Grafana Enterprise Plugin Dynatrace - Alias

[patmis]

In our company we use Grafana Enterprise as central solution for dashboards. We intent to use the Grafana Enterprise Plugin for Dynatrace. First tests were successful. There is just one area where we struggle and thats how to get proper names for series or instances. In Grafana this is achieved by setting an alias. However, we have yet not found how to set a proper alias for Synthetic Monitors to display only the name of the Synthetic Monitor. Currently it looks like this:

What do we have to use as alias? Somehow we sholbd be able to use `dt.entity.synthetic_test.name`as alias.
The tooltip is not much of use:

The documentation is in my opinion not very clear about aliases:

Alias

There are two different types of aliases you will encounter while using the Dynatrace plugin. The first is a static alias. An alias of this type is available on every query that you build, and the name of the alias starts with a lowercase letter. The second is a dynamic alias, which changes based on the metric that you are using in your query, and the name of the alias starts with an uppercase letter. The Dynatrace plugin supports several different aliases: Metric Names, Aggregation, Display Name, Host, and Description.

Name Value

$name	builtin:apps.other.keyUserActions.reportedErrorCount.os
$aggregation	auto,value
$displayName	Reported error count (by key user action, OS) [mobile, custom]

Does somebody know more about it? Thank you in advance!

Best Regards,
Patrick

[ChadTurner]

I would recommend also posting this to a Grafana community as well as its centric to Grafana and their configuration.

[36Krazyfists]

You ever find an answer to this? 

Whoever wrote that documentation should be... ashamed of themselves.  It doesn't explain at all what the point of the Alias is and how it can help in any way... 

Honestly the whole Dynatrace data source plugin is just not that great from a usability perspective in Grafana.  It doesn't support many of the things you would want from a Grafana data source, like multi variable support for example.  Nor does it parse and format the data very well.  It honestly needs to be recreated from the ground up.

Half the time I just use the Infinity plugin as I find the extra time spent creating the API call and putting in the parsing rules still ends up being less than the time it takes me to properly configure the Dynatrace source's query....

[patmis]

Hi @36Krazyfists ,

I generally agree with your sentiment regarding the Dynatrace plugin. However, the challenges in integrating Dynatrace data into Grafana stem not solely from the plugin itself, but also from the Dynatrace API.

In my experience, the API can be somewhat cumbersome when retrieving data. As we are using Dynatrace Managed, I cannot comment on the API's behavior within the SaaS solution.

Despite these challenges, we have successfully created Grafana dashboards that effectively display Dynatrace data using the Dynatrace Data Source Plugin. This process, however, required significant effort and experimentation.

For example, we extensively utilized transformations to obtain meaningful names for resources, such as Synthetic Monitors. We also effectively implemented dashboard variables to enhance flexibility and usability.

Example Query using variables:

Example "Transformations":

Example Dashboard:

I believe there's significant potential to optimize the Dynatrace Data Source Plugin to enhance user experience. Currently, the plugin can be challenging to use effectively.

Best Regards,
Patrick

[36Krazyfists]

Oh, I have tons of experience working with the Dynatrace API.  It's one of my least favorite API's, but its far from the worst out there, and the problems with the Dynatrace Data Source in Grafana don't stem from the Dynatrace API, but instead it's how the API is coded to handle data frames coming in from it and what features of the Grafana data source SDK they've enabled (or not enabled, really).

But yeah, I really like your example dashboard.  That would be great for our executives.  I assume those tiles can be drilled into and that they lead to more detailed dashboards with specifics when clicked on?