Why to use multiple environments within the same cluster?

[agrawal_shashan]

Hi, I am trying to find the advantages of using multiple environments. My existing solution is using only one environment and everything is working fine. I have used Host groups and Management zones and tagging to filter things as of now.

Is it a good idea to have multiple environments for Prod and Non-Prod? Just thinking if it would be worth setting up a new environment and then starting sending data for all Non-prod hosts to this environment.
Also within Non-prod, we have multiple like dev, stage, and int.

What are the benefits we would get and what would be the limitations?

One of my use cases would be - I want the Prod environment to be restricted i.e. to give people only read-only access to the monitoring settings and they should not be allowed to change anything. And in Non-Prod, they are allowed to do what they want.
There may be other use cases but I am not really sure at the moment. Any advice or help is appreciated.

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/get-started/monitoring-environment/set-up-multiple-monitoring...

Best Regards,
Shashank

[Mizső · Accepted solution]

Hi @agrawal_shashan,

Because of segregation of duties it is recommended to spearate the dev, int , uat and prod environments. Settings are evevironment wide so if you have only one environment you have the same seettings for the dev, int, uat and prod. I thnik you should test the settings before you promote to prod (eg. one agent features) or you should test the one agent new versions in lower level environment. Of course more environment will have more administartion, but you can use Monaco to syncronize the DT environments.

I hope is helps.

Best regards,

Mizső  

[Mohamed_Hamdy · Accepted solution]

Hi @agrawal_shashan,

I think you need to have a separate environment for production, so at least you can create two environments one for production and one for non-prod, UAT, ..etc.

as @Mizső mentioned that you need to test OneAgent features before enabling them on prod, and in some environments and based on the customer policy, you might need to disable OneAgent auto-update on the production environment and leave it enabled on the other environment (UAT, Non-prod) to test the updates first.

[agrawal_shashan]

Hi @Mohamed_Hamdy @Mizső Both of your points are Valid. But there are some disadvantages. For example the visualisation types are not customisable which is not helpful because I'd like to use the custom charts and display as per my need.

And moreover, whenever we make any changes to Dynatrace like updating the OA version, operator version our pipeline is designed in such a way that it first deploys everything to Non-Prod and once everything gets verified we move to Prod.

Having 2 or more environments looks much messier to me as there are lot of ways to filter in Dynatrace. For example we can use Management Zones, tagging to filter between Prod and Non-Prod. Within Non-prod we can use tagging.

Let me know what you guys think

[Yosi_Neuman]

Hi @agrawal_shashan agree with @Mizső and @Mohamed_Hamdy you need dynatrace environment per environment.

You can set dashboards to show information from multi dynatrace environments  

Updates are kept for all the dynatrace environments in one place, you will be able to decide in each and every dynatrace environment to which version to upgrade separately.

HTH

Yos