Extend business observability: Extract business events from outgoing web requests

Effective business observability relies on frictionless access to business data, wherever it lies. Expanding on the unique ability of Dynatrace OneAgent® to extract business data from in-flight application payloads, we’ve added the ability to capture business events from outgoing web requests, with comprehensive visibility into request and response bodies.

The business observability gap in cloud-based transactions

Business observability, at its best, delivers real-time insights into business health, reporting, and interpretation of the metrics and KPIs that business and IT leaders need to make decisive and effective decisions.

But how can you access this data when cloud-based solutions deliver your critical services? One of the more common examples is payment gateways, or payment service providers (PSPs)—hosted services that verify account details, check for available funds, and transfer money into your business merchant account.

There’s a wealth of business data in your systems’ transaction requests to these PSPs and other SaaS solutions. Without visibility into this data, you’re left with an incomplete and delayed understanding of transaction success, sales data, and business health. This is particularly problematic since the transaction success or failure status is often embedded within the response body.

Here are some of the challenges our customers have identified:

• Delays in resolving issues. Failed transactions are only discovered in scheduled reports or when customers complain.
• Reconciliation discrepancies. Inconsistencies between internal records and PSP reports lead to frustrating, time-consuming, and error-prone manual work.
• Inability to understand short-term trends. Identifying failure patterns for specific providers or transaction types is nearly impossible without timely and detailed transaction data.
• Compliance risks. Lack of granular detail makes auditing and demonstrating compliance with payment regulations more challenging.

Business events from outgoing web requests

Dynatrace business events are in a special class designed to support even the most demanding business use cases. Whether derived from OneAgent, log files, RUM sessions, or APIs, business events deliver real-time lossless access to critical business data—wherever it lies. In particular, OneAgent’s unique capability to extract business data from in-flight application payloads—without writing any code—has proven invaluable to hundreds of our customers.

OneAgent now supports capturing business events from outgoing web requests that are specifically designed to illuminate these blind spots. You can now transform critical business information within your outgoing web requests and their corresponding responses into structured business events, which can then be analyzed, correlated, and acted upon within Dynatrace.

Use case: Business events and payment gateways

Here’s how it works, and what it means for our payment gateway use case.

Granular configuration for targeted capture

• Define endpoint-specific rules to capture data from requests to specific URLs or IP addresses (for example, api.stripe.com/payments or paypal.com/checkout).
• Define method-specific rules to capture data from relevant HTTP methods like POST or PUT that are used to initiate transactions.

Deep insight into request and response payloads

Support for business-event capture from outgoing web requests adds compelling new value and expands on current OneAgent capabilities for extracting business data from in-flight application payloads.

• Extract data from the request body. Imagine you’re sending payment requests that include customer account numbers, transaction amounts, and transaction identifiers. You can now define rules to extract these key pieces of information directly from your JSON or XML request bodies. This is crucial for linking your internal transaction IDs to the business data sent to the provider.
• Extract data from the response body. Potentially greater value lies in the response body. Often, PSPs return transaction status messages (for example, transactionStatus:success, authorizationResult:approved, or responseCode:1954) within the response body. Extracting these status messages allows you to report, alert, and act on failures or anomalies as they occur.

Transform raw data into meaningful business insights

Business data increases in value when enriched with business and IT attributes. For example, you could map extracted fields to meaningful attributes of a “Payment Transaction” business event. These attributes might include payment_provider_id, transaction_amount, and customer_id, extracted from the request body, and payment_status extracted from the response body.

These events are automatically enriched with Dynatrace observability data, such as the request’s originating host, service, user journey, or geographical source, facilitating business and IT collaboration.

Real-time visibility and proactive alerts

• Real-time business transaction monitoring. Know each PSP transaction’s success, failure, and value as it happens, not hours later.
• Custom dashboards. Dashboards make it easy to visualize different PSPs’ success rates and revenue, exposing bottlenecks and highlighting business and failure trends.
• Proactive alerting. Set up alerts based on real-time payment status messages. Trigger alerts on failed transactions over a certain amount, or when the success rate SLA degrades.

Enhanced traceability and root cause analysis

• End-to-end transaction tracing. Trace the entire lifecycle of a payment, from the user initiating the purchase through your internal services to the outgoing request to the PSP and the response status indicating success or failure.
• Accelerated root cause analysis. Quickly determine the source of payment transaction failures, bottlenecks, and anomalies to speed resolution and improve business outcomes.

Payment gateway example: From opaque to transparent

Here’s what this could mean for your organization:

1. A customer attempts a major purchase. Your e-commerce system sends the request to your PSP, but the transaction is declined.
2. OneAgent captures relevant business data from the outgoing request, including customer ID and transaction amount attributes. Dynatrace also captures the relevant response fields, including the status:declined message.
3. A “Payment Failure” business event is automatically generated in Dynatrace. This event triggers an alert to notify your operations and customer support teams.
4. Your customer support team can now proactively contact the customer while your operations team works to resolve the issue, knowing exactly why the transaction failed and which provider was involved.

This is possible without any code changes. Extracting business data from outgoing requests and responses turns opaque customer interactions into transparent, actionable business insights, empowering you to improve customer experience, optimize payment workflows, and reduce operational risk.

Initial support for outgoing web request capture is available for Java; see Supported Technologies for details. Additional technology support will be available soon.

Get inspired and learn more

For business observability inspiration, check out our Business Analytics in action eBook, or watch these breakout session recordings from our customers.