Detection of BOSH instance metadata for your Cloud Foundry VMs

Dynatrace automatically detects and displays lots of metadata values related to VMs that constitute your Cloud Foundry foundation. We’re happy to announce that in addition to general-purpose host properties like virtualization or architecture, Dynatrace OneAgent now also automatically detects the following BOSH-specific BOSH instance metadata for your Cloud Foundry foundation VMs (aka “BOSH-managed VMs”):

• BOSH Instance ID – Unique identifier of a BOSH-managed VM
• BOSH Instance Name – Name of a BOSH-managed VM
• BOSH Availability Zone – Location information for a BOSH-managed VM
• BOSH Deployment ID – Unique identifier of the deployment a BOSH-managed VM belongs to

Dynatrace supports BOSH instance metadata detection for Linux and Windows OS types.

Improved hostname detection for BOSH-managed VMs

The BOSH project unifies release engineering, deployment, and lifecycle management of cloud platform software. BOSH is particularly well suited to provisioning and deploying large distributed systems. While BOSH was developed to deploy Cloud Foundry PaaS, it can be used to deploy almost any other software.

In large Cloud Foundry environments that span across multiple Availability Zones and comprise numerous BOSH deployments, the index of a BOSH-managed VM can’t serve as a reliable identifier. So we’ve improved how we detect hostnames for BOSH-managed VMs. We’ve changed from using BOSH instance name/index to BOSH instance name/BOSH instance ID.

Leverage BOSH instance metadata to manage your Cloud Foundry foundation in Dynatrace

You can use the automatically discovered BOSH instance metadata to manage large Cloud Foundry environments in several ways:

• You can define auto-tagging rules based on BOSH instance metadata to group all entities that belong to the same BOSH deployment.
• You can also apply naming schemes to your process groups and services based on BOSH instance metadata. For example, you can adapt the naming scheme of your Gorouter process groups to reflect the respective BOSH deployment in your process group name.
• You can also define Dynatrace management zones based on BOSH instance metadata (for example, based on the BOSH Availability Zone).

Please refer to Dynatrace Help for comprehensive guidelines for organizing monitored entities in your Dynatrace environments.

Note: With the release of OneAgent version 1.151, BOSH instance metadata will additionally be available for auto-tagging rules, process group naming schemes, and Management zones.

Next steps

We have many great new capabilities planned for Cloud Foundry monitoring with Dynatrace, so stay tuned! You’ll soon be able to fully benefit from host groups to manage your Cloud Foundry foundations.

In the meantime, let us know how you’re using BOSH instance metadata to manage your Cloud Foundry foundation in Dynatrace. Please share your feedback with us at Dynatrace Community.