All new OneAgent features to be initially released as Early Adopter Releases

At Dynatrace, we pride ourselves on bringing new features to you in an agile fashion. While we release a new version of Dynatrace OneAgent each month, it’s essential that OneAgent releases be stable and problem free. In practice, this means we must deliver product improvements without compromising existing installations. For this reason, going forward, we will release all new OneAgent features first as Early Adopter Releases, where they will be visible and available to all customers.

OneAgent deep monitoring features

Whenever we’re ready to introduce a new OneAgent deep monitoring feature, we’ll first release the feature in an Early Adopter Release. Early Adopter Release means that a feature:

• Is fully tested and supported
• May not yet be a 100% feature-complete
• Is available via user opt-in (i.e., you can choose to enable it or not).

When a new OneAgent feature is in Early Adopter Release you can either enable the feature for your entire environment or, for testing purposes, within just a few specific process groups. Notice in the image below that each feature specifies a minimum OneAgent version. This version specification is strictly adhered to—an Early Adopter Release feature can only be activated for OneAgents that satisfy the minimum version requirement. There is also a column that indicates if a feature requires a process restart for it to become operational.

To enable/disable an Early Adopter Release feature

1. Go to Settings > Server-side services > Deep monitoring.
2. Expand the OneAgent Early Adopter Release features section.
3. Enable/disable features for your environment as required.
   If you only want to make a feature available for testing within a few select process groups, click the Add OneAgent Early Adopter Release feature settings for a specific process group button.
   

What happens once Dynatrace declares a feature GA?

Typically, Dynatrace OneAgent follows a zero configuration approach for GA features. In keeping with this, the default state for most GA features is enabled. However, we’ve added a twist here. Once an Early Adopter Release feature goes GA in an existing environment, the feature isn’t enabled by default. While the status of new features changes to Released, you must explicitly confirm newly GA’d features to make them available across your environment by clicking the Confirm button (see second image below).

By confirming the GA status of a feature, the following changes are made to your configuration:

• The feature is enabled on all OneAgents that fulfill the minimum GA version requirement.
• The feature is disabled on all OneAgents that don’t fulfill the GA version requirement; this includes OneAgents that are still in Early Adopter Release!
• The feature is removed from the OneAgent Early Adopter Release features list (and added to the troubleshooting section of the Deep monitoring settings page).

This process ensures that you can safely upgrade to new OneAgent versions without activating features that you haven’t yet tested.

List of active OneAgent Early Adopter Release features

The new release process is already in place for the following new OneAgent features:

• Akka actor remoting
  For details, see the Support for Akka remoting (Early Adopter Release) announcement blog post.
• Java Jetty HTTP server (non-servlet)
  Most Jetty applications are based on the servlet specification. However, some Jetty applications like Akana Rogue Wave are based directly on Jetty handlers. We’ve supported this for a while and are now making this option publicly available. Use this if you use Jetty HTTP but don’t see any web request services.
• .NET messaging RabbitMQ
  OneAgent already supported RabbitMQ for Java and Node.js. We’ve added support for .NET.
• .NET MongoDB
  OneAgent already supported MongoDB for Java and Node.js. We’ve added support for .NET.
• Java CICS Transaction Gateway client
  We’re proud to announce visibility into CICS Transaction Gateway calls for Java applications (long live the mainframe!).