Synthetic Monitor SSH

Supported by Dynatrace

Report on KPIs through Synthetic monitors that execute Linux commands over SSH and interpret results numerically or by regular expressions.

Overview
Installation
Configuration
Explore data
Versions
Screenshots

Execute any command remotely over SSH and check for an expected output. This can be either a RegEx expression or a numeric comparison (e.g. <result> >= 7).

You can also specify a secondary user to run the command as, if different from the account used to log in. Results are reported as third-party synthetic tests with failures to match reported as availability events for your tests.

This extension will consume 0.1 DEM units per reported test result.

use cases

Execute commands or scripts to make sure your software is available
Run commands that output values to ensure they are within acceptable parameters
Run commands to make sure some file or resource is present

Compatibility information

The target host needs to accept SSH connections. Authentication can be either password or key based.

Installation

1. Deploy to ActiveGates

This extension has been developed with Dynatrace Extension Framework 1.0. This means that the .zip archive you have been provided with must be uploaded and extracted to the plugin_deployment folder of all ActiveGates that should run it.

By default this is found:

On Windows: %PROGRAMFILES%\dynatrace\remotepluginmodule\plugin_deployment
On Linux: /opt/dynatrace/remotepluginmodule/plugin_deployment

2. Upload to Dynatrace

The same .zip archive must also be uploaded to Dynatrace. In the Dynatrace UI, go to Settings > Monitored technologies > Custom extensions and click the Upload extension button.

The extension will appear in the list below:

Once this is visible, you can click on the extension name and begin configuration.

Configuration

Once the extension has been deployed, endpoints can be configured for carrying out the Linux commands over SSH.

Configuration parameters

Endpoint name - Free text. Used for display in Dynatrace
Synthetic test name - A name for this synthetic monitor. Defaults to "<hostname> (<command>)"
Dynatrace tenant url - URL to the Dynatrace environment where data should be reported.
Dynatrace API token - API token to use when reporting results (needs permission Create and read synthetic monitors, locations, and nodes (API v1))
Hostname - name or IP address of the target host
SSH port
Username
Password - Only needed if using password authentication
Secondary username and password - Only needed if you want to run commands as a user different from the one used to perform the SSH login
Private key file and passphrase - Needed only if you are using key based authentication
Command to run
Evaluation mode - Defines how the output will be evaluated
- TEXT_PATTERN_MATCH - evaluates output against a regular expression and checks for a match
- NUMERIC_VALUE_COMPARISON - evaluates numerical output against a comparison value
Comparison operator and value - Only needed if Output evaluation is NUMERIC_VALUE_COMPARISON; leave blank otherwise.
Text pattern to match - Only needed if Output evaluation is TEXT_PATTERN_MATCH; leave blank otherwise. Supports regular expressions.
Frequency - Test execution frequency, in minutes.
Location - A name for the location where this monitor is running on. Default is "ActiveGate".
Failure count - the number of consecutive failed test runs needed before an outage is reported.
Proxy address, username and password - These details can be used in case communication with Dynatrace is only possible through a proxy. Leave blank if not needed.

Explore data

Once the extension is successfully running, you can explore tests from the Synthetic menu. These are automatically created using your custom name or the hostname and command of the endpoint.

Outages are automatically signalled by Dynatrace, and in depth metrics are available as for other synthetic tests. These can be found easily by typing "synthetic.external" in the Metrics menu.

synthetic_metrics