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AppMon customers can push monitoring data to Dynatrace dashboards (Part 1 of 2)

We’re proud to announce that Dynatrace will soon provide a built-in-integration that automatically pushes selected AppMon monitoring data (monitoring metrics and business transaction data) directly to your Dynatrace SaaS or Dynatrace Managed dashboards. Leveraging the Dynatrace API, this new functionality gives you the convenience of consolidating all your AppMon and Dynatrace SaaS (or Dynatrace Managed) monitoring data into a single pane of glass.

Preserve your AppMon investment, leverage the power of Dynatrace

AppMon customers can now gain complete visibility into their AppMon metrics within Dynatrace dashboards. All your important AppMon metrics can now be charted and visualized using the standard set of Dynatrace dashboard tiles. The example dashboard below shows a custom Dynatrace dashboard that displays dashboard charts for two pushed AppMon instances.

Such cross-product integration ensures that your AppMon investment remains safe, including all your existing AppMon configurations, measures, business transactions, and more. And because AppMon-to-Dynatrace integration provides fine-grain, step-by-step control over the monitoring data that are pushed to Dynatrace, you now have the option for migrating from AppMon to Dynatrace at a pace that makes sense for your organization.

AppMon integration

What the new product integration provides

It doesn’t matter if you use a Dynatrace SaaS deployment or a Dynatrace Managed deployment—both deployment models support AppMon integration and the ability to chart all your important metrics on custom dashboards. And, of course, AppMon-to-Dynatrace integration can support as many AppMon servers as you have deployed in your environment. You can also send AppMon data to multiple Dynatrace environments (i.e., tenants) wherever applicable.

Pushing AppMon metrics

You can push any of the following AppMon metric types:

  • Measures
  • Business transactions
  • Host & process metrics
  • Server health metrics

AppMon integratins

Set up AppMon-to-Dynatrace integration

To enable AppMon-to-Dynatrace integration, open your AppMon rich client and configure the metric push. The Dynatrace environments page allows you to specify integration with multiple environments (see example below).

Integration setup requires that you provide an environment name for the integration, the URL of your Dynatrace installation (for example, https://{environmentID}.live.dynatrace.com/api/appmon/v1/) and an module token. To locate your AppMon API token go to https://{environmentID}/#settings/integration/dynakeys. You can always disable or enable the data push. This same setup is also used for PurePath drill-downs (more details about that feature will be covered in a follow-up blog post). In the likely event that you route your connections via a security Gateway, make sure you configure the integration correctly in the Security Gateway URL field.

Select AppMon metrics to push

Following successful configuration, you can select the metrics you want to push. The new integration provides two options for configuring the metrics you want to display on your Dynatrace dashboards. Because important metrics and KPIs are commonly integrated into dashboards, we’ve provided you with a wizard that enables you to select metrics directly from your AppMon dashboards.

The second way to export metrics is via the System Profile measure picker (context menu > Export to Dynatrace), as shown in the image below. In the new Measures filter, you can also narrow down exported metrics for certain environments.

Prerequisites

Here’s what you’ll need to set up AppMon-to-Dynatrace integration:

  • AppMon Server version 7.1.x or higher
  • Dynatrace product version >= v143 (planned availability for Dynatrace SaaS is April 18th. Dynatrace Managed is May 28th)
  • Dynatrace module token (required for AppMon configuration)
  • AppMon permission to enable the data push

Limitations

Here’s a brief overview of the currently known limitations:

  • No capabilities for pushing/exporting historical data (only real-time data push is supported)
  • A single metric can only be pushed to a specific Dynatrace environment (i.e., tenant), not multiple environments
  • Limit of 150 metrics per AppMon Server
  • Configuration via AppMon rich client only
  • Custom host measures cannot be exported

Want more details?

In this Performance Clinic, you can see additional details about the integration:

What’s next?

Please read about AppMon-to-Dynatrace key transactions (PurePaths) integration in the upcoming blog post, where I’ll explain cross-product PurePaths.

FAQ

  • Does the data push work with multiple AppMon Servers?
    • Yes
  • Does the data push have any impact on the size of an AppMon Server?
    • No
  • Does the solution work for both Dynatrace SaaS and Dynatrace Managed?
    • Yes
  • Is the communication secure? What kind of authentication is used?
  • What is the required bandwidth for communication?
    • This depends on the data you send. The payload isn’t too high though (about 60 bytes per metric/min)
  • Can I send historical data from AppMon (for example, data older than 1 year)?
    • Not at this time
  • Is there any sizing impact on the Dynatrace side?
    • No, you only need more storage space. 100 metrics will require approximately 8.5 MB/day, 260 MB/month or 3GB/year.
  • What are the limitations (for example, the maximum number of metrics)?
    • There will be a limitation of 150 metrics per AppMon server.
  • Is it possible to set alerts on AppMon metrics in Dynatrace?
    • Not at this time
  • Does the data push from AppMon also supports dynamic measures?
    • Yes, new splittings will automatically be added
  • Is there any self-monitoring available?
    • Yes, information about the total count of exported metrics, sent data, etc.
  • How often does AppMon send data to Dynatrace? Is the data aggregated?
    • AppMon sends data every minute. Aggregation is at 1-minute intervals.