Auditing Dynatrace mission control communication

[Julius_Loman]

Is there a configuration option or an official utility to audit/dump communication to Dynatrace Mission Control?

Some customers (mostly financial/telco/healthcare) do have strict security policy about communication outside their network and all data uploaded/downloaded to 3rd parties must be audited. Since communication to Dynatrace Mission Control is encrypted, it's not directly possible to see and dump communication payload.

[pahofmann]

I have customer where this will be relevant as well. It was mentioned that it will be possible to intercept the uplink with a proxy and analyze the data.

Is there more concrete information on that?

[Julius_Loman]

Actually the endpoints for outbound communication are specified in the server configuration file. If you use a classic MITM proxy, it will probably not work because of certificate validation. You would have to add a custom certificate to truststore for Dynatrace server and maybe other components as well.

If Dynatrace server allows changing those endpoint urls (billing, opc, ...) to non https, it would be quite simple to write a "proxy" to dump communication and forward it to mission control. However not sure about the websocket communication from Dynatrace into customer environment.

Probably both methods can be used, but I'm asking for official supported solution.

[Radoslaw_Szulgo · Accepted solution]

There is no generally available tools to dump the clear text payload sent to Mission Control. We can discuss internally what's inside each request.

Please also read new topic in documentation "How does Mission Control pro-active support work?" and

How Mission Control pro-active support works

in particular:

Dynatrace Mission Control is responsible for sending

• Usage and billing information.
• Dynatrace Server health statistics
  
  Once permission is granted, our Mission Control team can remotely
  analyze the hardware utilization of your Dynatrace Managed installation
  and alert you if more resources are required.
• Dynatrace Server event tracking
  Events like server starts/shutdowns, added/removed nodes, and Security
  Gateway registrations are tracked automatically. Our Mission Control
  team can remotely analyze and address problems or incompatibilities with
  your Dynatrace Server, so you don't need to track and react to system
  events. If you should ever need to contact Dynatrace Support, you won't
  need to collect the required log files for problem details—Mission
  Control gathers this data for your automatically. To see the list of
  Dynatrace Server system events that are automatically logged, click the Events tile on your Dynatrace Managed home page.
• System settings
  Our Mission Control team can remotely optimize your Dynatrace Managed settings to ensure optimum performance and stability.
• Software updates
  Dynatrace Managed software updates are mandatory and are typically
  published every four weeks. You can customize the timing of Dynatrace
  Managed updates (daily or weekly). Updates are automatically
  communicated to your users at least 24 hours in advance. Dynatrace
  Managed updates are fast and allow monitoring to continue seamlessly.

[pahofmann]

@Radoslaw S. could you ping me so we can discuss the possibilities of intercepting the mission control traffic? patrick.hofmann@amasol.de

[Julius_Loman]

I'm aware what is mission control used for.
However this answer won't be acceptable by security personnel in environments with high security requirements (agents on servers processing sensitive data, such as banking).

Not being able to audit communication will likely prohibit Dynatrace for being deployed (=purchased) in such environments.

[canadalove150]

Do we have any update on this? Would like to get more details how the data can be audited and what type of flexibility is available in what information can be sent from the managed server.

[gary_spencer]

There is flexibility, observe the preferences available to a cluster admin in the CMC. There is also complete audits available to cluster admins in the CMC (observe audit log in the sidebar in pic below).

As above mentioned by Radoslaw, check the Mission Control Security section.

Dynatrace have provided further insight in the Trust Center, if you are interested in this subject.

[chuan_sern_wong]

Any update on this ?

[Julius_Loman]

Nothing has changed, but you can still do MITM communication auditing. It requires some work with adding a certificate to the trust store so Dynatrace Cluster can trust the MITM proxy.

Anyway, any changes from Dynatrace are being audited in the Audit log available in the CMC.

[skrystosik]

Some of our clients are unsecuring communication to mission control and tracking it for some time. After that they are going back to normal. I don’t know any other option.

Sebastian