Create remote/multi-environment Dynatrace dashboards

A Dynatrace dashboard can include monitoring artifacts (such as metrics, logs, events, user sessions, and server-side traces) from multiple Dynatrace environments and can even support remote management zones.

Overview

Advantages

Dynatrace dashboards serve as a single pane of glass for monitoring artifacts such as metrics, logs, events, and user sessions. With multi-environment dashboards, your dashboards can combine these monitoring artifacts from separate Dynatrace environments.

After you configure the remote connection in your local Dynatrace environment, you can quickly point dashboard tiles to the remote environment.

When you select a remote environment, the management zone filter (in the top menu bar) lists the management zones that are available in the selected remote environment and allows you to filter for a specific zone at the dashboard-tile level. In this way, you can easily build convenient overview reports, covering multiple environments and multiple management zones all on a single dashboard.

Because the remote-environment capabilities of dashboard tiles allow you to build a common overview of problems and other data, dashboards can essentially serve as a hub for deeper analysis. A single click on any given dashboard tile displaying remote information takes you straight into a dedicated view of the remote environment where you can continue your analysis.

Limitations

• All environments need to be on the same Dynatrace version.
• Remote-environment connections don’t pass user context and permissions over environment boundaries. For this reason, using management zones is the best practice in order to segment/limit dashboard tiles when viewing remote information.
• Because of the above consideration, remote-environment dashboards can only be configured by environment administrators. However, regular users can still view and interact with remote-environment dashboards without limitation.
• The world map dashboard tile isn’t suited for (and therefore doesn’t support) remote-environment scenarios.

Configuration

To create a dashboard tile that queries data from a remote environment:

• In the remote Dynatrace environment, create an access token that permits you to query data from that environment
• In the local Dynatrace environment, add the remote environment to the table of remote environments
• In the local Dynatrace environment, create one or more tiles that display remote data queried from the remote environment

Create an access token

With this procedure, you get two items that you need in the other steps:

• An access token that gives you permission to pull data from a remote Dynatrace environment
• The URI of the remote Dynatrace environment

To create an access token for the remote Dynatrace environment

1. Sign in to the remote environment.
   • This is the environment from which you pull data.
   • If you can't sign in to the remote environment, someone with access to the remote environment can do this procedure for you.
2. In the Dynatrace menu, go to Access tokens.
3. Select Generate new token.
4. Enter a token name.
5. Find the Fetch data from a remote environment scope (RestRequestForwarding) and select its checkbox.
6. Select Generate token.
   This generates a token that gives your local environment permission to pull data from this remote environment.
7. Select Copy and then paste the token to a secure location.
   It's a long string that you need to copy and paste back into Dynatrace later.
8. While you're signed in to the remote environment, copy the URI of the remote environment (for example, https://dynatrace.mybostonsite.com) from the browser address line.

Add the remote environment

To add the remote Dynatrace environment to your list of available remote environments

1. Sign in to your local Dynatrace environment.

2. In the Dynatrace menu, go to Settings.

3. Select Integration > Remote environments.

4. Select Connect environment.

5. Define the remote environment from which your local environment pulls data, and then select Save changes.

   • Name is the name under which this environment will be listed in your local Dynatrace environment when you configure a tile to query this remote environment. This is freeform text. It doesn't affect the remote environment.

   • Remote environment URI is the URI you copied from the browser address line in the previous procedure.

   • Network scope

     • External: The remote environment is located in another network. Globally configured proxy settings are used if present. This is the default scope.
     • Internal: The remote environment is located in the same network. Globally configured proxy settings are not used.
     • Cluster: The remote environment is located in the same cluster. The request is made to localhost.

     Dynatrace SaaS can only use the External network scope.

   • Token is the token you generated in the previous procedure. It needs to include the Fetch data from a remote environment scope (RestRequestForwarding).

   • Test connection checks the connection from your local environment to the remote environment.

   Example

   

Now that you have established a link to the remote environment, you can create dashboard tiles that query that environment.

Create a tile that displays remote data

To create a tile that pulls data from the remote environment

1. Display the dashboard that will display the tile.

2. Select Edit.

3. Select or add a tile on which you want to display data from the remote environment.
   The Environment section of the tile settings pane displays the name of the environment from which that tile pulls monitoring data.

   • Default (local) configures the tile to pull its data from the local Dynatrace environment.
   • All other listed environments are remote environments for which a connection has been established.

4. Select the remote environment that you want the selected tile to query.
   If you named the remote environment Boston when you added the remote environment in the previous procedure, Boston should be on this list.

   

5. Select Done to display the finished dashboard.

6. Hover over the tile filter icon to see the environment selection.

   

Examples

Same tiles, different environments

In this example, we create a dashboard that shows the host health and network status for the local environment and a remote environment side by side. We assume that you have already added the remote environment to your local environment.

1. In the Dynatrace menu, go to Dashboards, select Create dashboard, give it a name, and select Create.

2. Drag two Header tiles to the dashboard (or drag one and then clone it).

3. Edit one header to say Local and the other to say Remote.

4. Drag two Host health tiles to the dashboard (or drag one and then clone it).
   Position one under the Local header and the other under the Remote header.

5. Drag two Network status tiles to the dashboard (or drag one and then clone it).
   Position one under the Local header and the other under the Remote header.

   At this point, all of the tiles query the local environment, so you have two identical Host health tiles and two identical Network status tiles.

   

6. Under the Remote header, edit the Host health and Network status tiles so that both of them query the remote environment (Boston in this example).

   

7. Select Done to display the dashboard.

   • The tiles under Local still display local host and network information.
   • The tiles under Remote now query the remote environment:
     • The remote tiles display the host health and network status for the remote environment, not the default local environment.
     • The remote tiles each display a filter icon. Hover over the icon to see the environment name.

   

You can of course add other tile types and point to additional remote environments.

Troubleshooting