Most people consume software the way they enjoy a meal at a restaurant: ready-made from a menu, crafted by experts, and served with convenience to satisfy a need. At Dynatrace, we take pride in delivering software that’s as refined and reliable as a Michelin-star dish.
But we’d be remiss not to invite the creative and demanding cooks of the developer world into the kitchen itself. That’s why we’ve opened up access to the world-class environment we’ve built, complete with carefully sourced ingredients and precision tooling.
In that spirit, we follow a simple mantra: build for builders. We use what we ship, and ship what we build. That’s what drove the recent launch of the Dynatrace MCP Server, designed to equip developers with observability context and security. The result? Faster fixes, safer code, and superior performance.
But our commitment to developers goes even further. To ensure that our app teams can ship confidently and quickly, we’re focused on delivering exceptional developer experience: striving for faster, more reliable, and user-friendly tooling.
And because we share our tooling with customers and partners, every improvement we make benefits the broader community. That’s why we launched App Toolkit 1.0: a developer-first toolkit that reflects our commitment to support builders. It equips teams with the means to craft custom apps and solutions on the Dynatrace platform with greater speed, flexibility, and clarity.
From SREs building apps to automate quality gates and monitor MS Teams, to dev teams diving deep into CI/CD metrics down to commit ratios; from CMDB apps that transform Smartscape® data into dynamic configuration maps, to support staff tracking container metrics, our customers and partners have built one of the broadest and most versatile collections of custom apps on Dynatrace.
Accelerate developer productivity
The App Toolkit is the developer toolchain that’s designed to turn ideas into custom apps that extend the Dynatrace platform and deliver tailored solutions for your organization. From a single command line, developers can create, develop, and deploy apps, create new app functions, or update packages.
The focus of this release is on improving developer productivity, articulated through smarter builds, automation-ready design, and a streamlined UI. This makes it easier than ever to create, develop, and maintain Dynatrace Apps.
Smarter builds for enterprises
The App Toolkit 1.0 allows for smarter builds that dramatically cut development and deployment time while improving support for building large-scale apps. Key performance enhancements include the change detection system and enhanced type checking.
The new change detection system improves performance by only building and checking components with actual changes instead of scanning the entire codebase. This means that the dev server triggers re-builds whenever changes are made during development, ensuring that the latest updates are immediately reflected in the browser. This significantly optimizes rebuild times: going from an average of 2.7 seconds in the previous version to just 0.05 seconds, a 54-fold increase in speed.
Enhanced type checking operates seamlessly in the background when initializing a new workspace. Developers no longer need to wait for type checks to complete before proceeding. This allows teams to build custom apps for large codebases with hundreds of files, where comprehensive type checking is a bottleneck. The newly introduced incremental type checking ensures that recent changes and relevant code are prioritized, facilitating robust typing practices even in larger projects.
The combination of both features significantly accelerates feedback loops. Since only modified files and their dependencies undergo re-checking, with background type checking turned on, type errors are identified and resolved in a fraction of the time.
Automation-ready commands for CI/CD Efficiency
The App Toolkit 1.0 introduces an enhanced CLI designed for automation. Every command line can automatically run in scripts or pipelines, making it ideal for CI/CD. Commands that accept additional parameters can now be executed with arguments and options directly in the command line, instead of being prompted every time the CLI needs input. Builds and deployment processes stay automated, consistent, and repeatable, ultimately accelerating delivery.
A brand-new interface for faster, error-free development
The enhanced command line interface features a redesigned command structure. All available commands are now easier to discover and use consistently and intuitively. Each command now supports a comprehensive set of parameters as options, allowing developers to access the full capabilities of the in-pipeline automations.
The CLI has improved interactions for workflow continuity. For instance, when creating a function, the output now displays all generated files within a file tree, offering clear feedback on the results of each action.
The smarter workspace setup now features a distinct separation between the user interface components and Dynatrace app functions. This offers transparency into the workspace structure and minimizes errors, particularly relevant to enterprises dealing with increased application complexity and size. Furthermore, we’ve introduced suffixes for Dynatrace Apps functions and other conventions, significantly reducing configuration complexity.
Ready to get started?
Getting started with the App Toolkit is as straightforward as it is powerful. To kick off your build, ensure your environment meets the minimum requirements, then run the following command in your code editor terminal:
npx dt-app@latest create
Next, we recommend installing the Dynatrace Apps extension for VS Code or Cursor. For documentation, examples, and best practices, head over to Dynatrace Developer and explore everything you need to build with confidence.
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