Generic Linux Commands

Supported by Dynatrace

Remotely execute commands on your Linux hosts (over SSH). Baseline and alert on your KPIs through metrics created from the command output.

Overview
Installation
Configuration
Versions
Screenshots

Execute any command remotely over SSH and transform the output into Dynatrace metrics. The extension supports either one metric (the output as-is) or multiple metrics (by splitting the output using expected delimiters). This allows you to then leverage Dynatrace Alerting & Baselining to track your custom KPIs.

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 metrics.

This extension will consume 0.001 DDU per metric datapoint ingested.

use cases

Execute commands or scripts to make sure your software is available
Gather business metrics from script outputs
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
Frequency - The command execution frequency, in minutes.
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 Ingest metrics (API v2))
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
Extraction mode - Defines how the command output will translate to metrics
- SINGLE_VALUE - One metric will be created from the output. The command output must be a numerical value.
- MULTIPLE_VALUES - The output will be split based on the given delimiters and multiple metrics are created from it. Each metric value must be numerical.
Metric pair delimiter - Only needed for multiple metric reporting. This delimiter represents the character by which metric pairs are separated in the command output. (E.g. '\n', ',')
Key/value delimiter - Only needed for multiple metric reporting. This delimiter represents the character by which keys and values of a metric are separated in the command output. (E.g. ':', ';', '=')