The dynaTrace Architecture

Whether you have invested in a "suite" or simply chosen to buy a tool at a time, APM solutions often fall short of their promises. They are either too hard to deploy and use, or incomplete and siloed. With the benefit of hindsight and the guidance of customers, dynaTrace has changed all this. At the foundation of the dynaTrace system is a 3-tier architecture that breaks through the limitations of traditional approaches. Smart agents ease deployment, reduce risk and increase value. The global collector provides secure scalability in widely distributed and dynamic environments. And the dynaTrace server is the work horse that makes many of the dynaTrace breakthroughs possible.

Distributed, service and message based architectures, open source and 3rd party frameworks, components from distributed development teams, virtualized data centers and cloud computing are all exciting innovations. But for application performance management, they accelerate complexity at a rate never seen before. Understanding how an application really behaves under load is the secret. Averages, heuristics and sampling do not provide enough depth or clarity. Log and debug outputs are no longer maintainable. Yet to get more has always meant too much overhead. With dynaTrace’s patented PurePath Technology®, and all of this is accomplished without endless configuration effort.

Today’s applications are increasingly distributed and global. Understanding runtime performance across tiers, identifying scalability bottlenecks when transactions are remotely executed, and isolating stability issues when 3rd party components and frameworks are introduced are some of the new challenges application architects and operators now face. How we assure data security, manage firewall access, and limit WAN traffic are new considerations as well. Proven in the most demanding financial application environments in the world, you can be confident that dynaTrace can scale securely to meet your most demanding disturbed, global application needs.

With the advances in virtualization and cloud computing, a new wave of application complexity is upon us. What simplifies our server environments accelerates application management complexity. Suddenly, physical and hypervisor timings are different. Virtual machines and/or servers can be dynamically added, moved or removed. Application management systems must become smarter and more dynamic as well, not simply provisioning themselves automatically, but doing this without blind-spots, without data loss. dynaTrace was built with these advanced architectural requirements in mind. Nothing to add, you already own it.

Applications are expected to provide years of service. We don’t just build, test and push them to production once. We enhance them, fix them, expand them, inter-connect them, upgrade them, move them, and virtualize them. The application lifecycle is a continuous process involving numerous stakeholders. dynaTrace supports these stakeholders – developers, architects, testers, operators and business owners – with a unique, cross-lifecycle system that brings automation and value to each stage of your application lifecycle.

With so many stakeholders involved throughout the application lifecycle collaboration is a challenge. Everyone has different data, speak a different language and often have different agendas. Without a single system of record, without a single source of ‘objective evidence’, collaboration can be challenging if not impossible. In keeping with its system approach, dynaTrace builds in a collaboration framework with a common lingua franca that’s developer-centric. You don’t have to speak-it, you don’t even have to understand it – its automatically captured so testers and operators can share it, and developers and architects can view it and interpret it in their favorite dashboard.

Your application needs are unique. Your application environment is unique. Therefore, you need an APM system that is both malleable and adaptable to fit your unique requirements. And this system must not just fit today’s requirements, but must be extensible to your future requirements as well. dynaTrace’s open OSGI-base plug-in model, REST interfaces, flexible dashboard system and more provide an easily customized, highly extensible system to fit like a glove today, while giving you confidence you’ll be ready for whatever changes tomorrow may bring.