Multi-cloud architecture is now the norm. Each cloud brings unique strengths, and Alibaba Cloud often plays a key role for organizations with customers or operations in China and the broader Asia‑Pacific region. To make the most of the flexibility of multi-cloud environments, teams need a clear view of how their infrastructure fits together.
The Dynatrace Alibaba Cloud extension helps provide that visibility by bringing Alibaba Cloud telemetry directly into the Dynatrace AI-powered observability platform. The extension is provided to customers and supported by Dynatrace, and is developed by Phenisys, a French IT consulting firm and Premier Dynatrace® Sales Partner with more than 20 years of experience, supporting IT and application observability for customers operating complex, large‑scale environments.
Deep, integrated Alibaba Cloud visibility with Dynatrace
When operating at the scale of large multi-cloud deployments, unified observability becomes essential to avoid blind spots and fragmented operational workflows. The Alibaba Cloud Extension for Dynatrace allows you to observe and analyze Alibaba Cloud services alongside other cloud environments and application components, ensuring full-stack context and deep operational insights.
This extension is designed to:
- Automatically discover and monitor Alibaba Cloud components, with baseline behavior derived from observed metrics.
- Ingest rich metric streams for critical services such as Elastic Compute Service (ECS), Server Load Balancer (SLB), Network Address Translation (NAT) Gateway, Cloud Enterprise Network (CEN), Network Attached Storage (NAS), and VPN.
- Retrieve and correlate Alibaba tags with Dynatrace OneAgent entities, preserving native cloud metadata and enabling powerful filtering, grouping, and contextualization of telemetry.
How it works: Mechanisms and data characteristics
Unlike sampling-only tools or periodic polling models that provide limited context, the Dynatrace extension operates via remote ActiveGate instances that connect directly to Alibaba Cloud’s Cloud Monitor API endpoints.
Data collection model
- Pull vs poll: The extension pulls metrics directly from Alibaba Cloud’s monitoring APIs via ActiveGate. Dynatrace ingests metrics as exposed by those APIs, without introducing additional sampling beyond the source data.
- Granularity: Metrics such as CPU utilization, network throughput, IOPS, latency, and health statuses are reported at their native resolution (typically minute-level resolution with cloud provider API semantics).
- Topology and correlation: Resource identifiers and Alibaba tags are ingested so that ECS instances and other resources are correlated with the Dynatrace topology model and can be mapped to application performance and dependency graphs.
Licensing and data handling
- Metrics ingestion is metered based on actual metric data points. Dynatrace classic and platform subscription models calculate consumption accordingly.
- There is no upfront cost to activate the Alibaba Cloud extension in Dynatrace Hub. Charges apply only for the telemetry volume ingested.
AI-powered insights with Dynatrace
Dynatrace Intelligence is an agentic operations system at the core of the Dynatrace platform that fuses deterministic AI with agentic AI to drive a new level of reliability across observability and AI-powered operations. By unifying Alibaba Cloud telemetry with broader application and infrastructure data, Dynatrace customers can:
- Detect performance deviations across services.
- Evaluate cross-layer dependencies automatically.
- Provide causal analysis to accelerate resolution during incidents.
This level of intelligence helps reduce alert fatigue and empowers teams to identify underlying issues and rapidly take remediation steps—even in complex multi-cloud environments where manual correlation would be prohibitively time-consuming.
Business and operational benefits
Bringing Alibaba Cloud into the Dynatrace observability fold enables:
- Unified dashboards and governance across hybrid and multi-cloud stacks.
- Faster troubleshooting with contextualized telemetry and AI-powered analysis.
- Metadata-driven insights using native Alibaba tags correlated with Dynatrace topology.
- Support improved operational efficiency by eliminating blind spots and integrating cloud metrics with service performance and user experience.
Getting Started
For IT leaders, Ops, or SRE teams, the Alibaba Cloud extension is accessible via the Dynatrace Hub and fully documented for deployment.
Further reading
- Get the extension from the Hub:
- Technical documentation:
- Other apps built by Phenisys:
Dynatrace®; OneAgent®; ActiveGate®; and Dynatrace Intelligence are trademarks of the Dynatrace, Inc. group of companies. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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