Set up Dynatrace Managed for AWS monitoring

You can integrate Dynatrace with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for intelligent monitoring of services running in the Amazon Cloud. AWS integration helps you stay on top of the dynamics of your data center in the cloud.

Overview

Follow these basic steps to integrate Dynatrace Managed with Amazon Web Services (AWS):

1. Configure the access method

2. Select your AWS partition

3. Adjust monitoring to your needs

AWS costs

Dynatrace makes Amazon API requests every five minutes. In addition to CloudWatch API calls, Dynatrace makes API calls to the monitored AWS services to learn about their instances, tags, etc. The list of called services and actions is available below in the Create the monitoring policy section.

Here's a rough estimate of AWS monitoring costs:

AWS monitoring policy

The AWS monitoring policy defines the minimal scope of permissions you need to give to Dynatrace to monitor the services running in your AWS account. Create it once and use it any time when enabling Dynatrace access to your AWS account. If you don't want to add permissions to all services, and just select permissions for certain services, consult the table below. The table contains a set of permissions that are required for all services (All monitored Amazon services) and, for each cloud service, a list of optional permissions specific to that service.

Access method

To get the information required for comprehensive AWS cloud-computing monitoring, Dynatrace needs to identify all the virtualized infrastructure components in your AWS environment and collect performance metrics related to those components. We use this information to understand the context of your applications, services, and hosts. For this to happen, you need to authorize Dynatrace to access your Amazon metrics.

Make sure that your Environment ActiveGate or Managed Cluster has a working connection to AWS. Configure your proxy for Managed or ActiveGate, or allow access to *.amazonaws.com in your firewall settings.

Role-based access with Environment ActiveGate or Dynatrace Managed Server

The instructions below apply whether or not the account hosting your ActiveGate is the same as your monitored account.

In a typical setup, you need to create two CloudFormation stacks using CloudFormation templates:

• A CloudFormation stack from the account hosting your ActiveGate, containing the following resources:
  • A role for your Environment ActiveGate or Dynatrace Managed Server hosted in your AWS infrastructure, on an Amazon EC2 host.
  • Its attached policy, which defines the monitored account permissions.
• A CloudFormation stack from the monitored account, containing the following resources:
  • A dedicated monitoring role for Dynatrace in your AWS account.
  • Its attached policy, which defines the Dynatrace authentication permissions to your AWS environment.

Prerequisites for role-based access, with Environment ActiveGate or Dynatrace Managed Server

• Dynatrace Managed Server installed on an Amazon EC2 host. It must be able to assume a role within your AWS account that allows it to read the Dynatrace monitoring data.

• The ID of the AWS account that hosts the ActiveGate (for example, the account that hosts your Dynatrace components, which in this case is the one hosting Environment ActiveGate or Dynatrace Managed Server).

• The Amazon Web Services monitored account ID (the account you want to monitor).

• The name of the role with which your Environment ActiveGate or Dynatrace Managed Server was started.

• The External ID.

  How to get the External ID

  1. In the Dynatrace menu, go to Settings.
  2. Go to Cloud and virtualization > AWS and select Connect new instance.
  3. Under Authentication method, select Role-based authentication.
  4. Under Your Amazon account ID, select Copy to copy the token (the External ID).

To enable access to your Amazon account using role-based access, follow the steps below.

Create a role for ActiveGate on the account that hosts ActiveGate

Create a monitoring role for Dynatrace on your monitored account

Modify ActiveGate configuration

Create a role for ActiveGate on the account that hosts ActiveGate

1. Create a YAML file and paste the contents of github role_based_access_AG_account_template.yml.

2. Create the stack in your Amazon Console or using the CLI.

bashcopydownload
aws cloudformation create-stack \
--capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM \
--stack-name <stack_name> \
--template-body <file:///home/user/template_file.yaml> \
--parameters ParameterKey=ActiveGateRoleName,ParameterValue=<role_name> ParameterKey=AssumePolicyName,ParameterValue=<policy_name> ParameterKey=MonitoringRoleName,ParameterValue=<monitoring_role_name> ParameterKey=MonitoredAccountID,ParameterValue=<monitored_account_id>

3. Go to the Amazon EC2 console, right-click an instance hosting your Environment ActiveGate, and select Security > Modify IAM role.

4. Select the role you created at step 1 (for example, Dynatrace_ActiveGate_role), and select Apply.

Create a monitoring role for Dynatrace on your monitored account

After the Dynatrace_ActiveGate_role is created on the account hosting the ActiveGate, create a role for the account to be monitored.

1. Create a YAML file and paste the content from the github role_based_access_monitored_account_template.yml.

2. Create the stack in your Amazon Console or using the CLI.

   In the Amazon Console

   1. In your Amazon Console, go to CloudFormation.

   2. Go to Stacks and create a new stack with new resources.

   3. Select Template is ready, upload the template you created above, and select Next.

   4. In Parameters, enter:

   • The External ID. For details, see Prerequisites
   • The ActiveGateRoleName and the ActiveGateAccountID from the stack created in Step 1.

   Optionally, adapt other parameters as needed.

   5. Enter a name for your stack, and then select Next twice.
   6. Review your configuration, enable I acknowledge that AWS CloudFormation might create IAM resources with custom names, and select Create stack.
   Using the CLI

   Run the command below, making sure to replace the parameter values with your actual values.

   You need to remove the angle brackets (< and >).

   bashcopydownload
   aws cloudformation create-stack \
   --capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM \
   --stack-name <stack_name> \
   --template-body <file:///home/user/template_file.yaml> \
   --parameters ParameterKey=ExternalID,ParameterValue=<external_id> ParameterKey=ActiveGateRoleName,ParameterValue=<activegate_role_name> ParameterKey=ActiveGateAccountID,ParameterValue=<activegate_account_id>
   ParameterKey=RoleName,ParameterValue=<role_name> ParameterKey=PolicyName,ParameterValue=<policy_name>

Modify ActiveGate configuration

1. Edit the custom.properties configuration file of the ActiveGate that you want to use for AWS monitoring.

2. Set the following properties as below:

   plaintextcopydownload
   [aws_monitoring]
   use_aws_proxy_role = false
   aws_monitoring_enabled = true

   ActiveGate version 1.183 or earlier

   plaintextcopydownload
   [vertical.topology]
   use_aws_proxy_role = false

   plaintextcopydownload
   [aws_monitoring]
   aws_monitoring_enabled = true

   Multiple ActiveGates

   It's enough to use only one ActiveGate dedicated for AWS monitoring. However, some deployment scenarios (for example, for redundancy purposes) might require multiple ActiveGates in your deployment.

   Make sure that only properly configured ActiveGates have aws_monitoring_enabled set to true.

   • They need network access to AWS endpoints.
   • For role-based monitoring, they must have proper roles attached.

   Keep in mind that Dynatrace cluster nodes contain embedded ActiveGates. Make sure to set the aws_monitoring_enabled property to false on these ActiveGates if they're not configured fully for AWS monitoring.

   If the ActiveGate is dedicated to AWS monitoring, you must also set the MSGrouter property to false:

   plaintextcopydownload
   [collector]
   MSGrouter = false

   Remove aws_proxy_account and aws_proxy_role properties.

3. Save the file and restart the ActiveGate main service.

Connect your Amazon account

Once you've granted AWS access to Dynatrace, it's time to connect Dynatrace to your Amazon AWS account.

1. In Dynatrace, go to Settings > Cloud and virtualization > AWS and select Connect new instance.

2. Select the Role-based authentication method.

   • Create a name for this connection. If you leave this field empty, the name Role will be used on Dynatrace pages to define this connection.
   • In the Role field, type the name of the role you created in Amazon for Dynatrace (for example, Dynatrace_monitoring_role).
   • Type your Account ID (the account you want us to pull metrics from).
   • Select Connect to verify and save the connection.

3. Once the connection is successfully verified and saved, your AWS account will be listed in the Cloud and virtualization settings page.
   You should soon begin to see AWS cloud monitoring data.

Select your AWS partition

If your AWS account is on a different partition than the default aws partition, you can select it and Dynatrace will connect to it instead.

To change your AWS partition

1. In the Dynatrace menu, go to Settings and select Cloud and virtualization > AWS.
2. Find the instance where you want to change the partition and select to edit the instance.
3. In the AWS partition list, select your partition.
4. Select Save.

Adjust monitoring to your needs

You can alter the scope and content of your monitoring depending on your preferences by using tags and listing services needed.

Limit monitored resources using tags

We recommend that you limit the scope of your AWS monitoring and reduce the number API calls to Amazon. You can use tagging to limit the AWS resources (AWS service instances) that are monitored by Dynatrace.

Set up metric events for alerting

To configure metric events for alerting

1. In the Dynatrace menu, go to Settings > Cloud and virtualization > AWS.
2. Under Metric events for alerting, select Manage alerting rules.
3. On the Metric events for alerting page, you can create, enable/disable, and configure recommended alerting rules.

For an overview of all recommended alerting rules for all supporting services, see the list below.

1. Create and enable alerting rules.

   To enable recommended alerting rules, you first need to create them. You can create alerting rules and automatically enable them, or (if you clear Automatically enable created rules) create them and manually enable them after possible configuration changes.

   

   For example, you can create and automatically enable a first batch of alerts. When you start monitoring new services, you can create alerts for these new services without automatically enabling them (because you want to configure them first).

2. Configure alerting rules. How you edit rules depends on whether you chose to automatically enable alerts.

   • If you chose to automatically enable alerts when creating them, go to Adjust recommended alerting rules, expand Enabled recommended alerting rules, and select any rule. This takes you to Edit custom event for alerting, where you can change the configuration rules for that specific service.

     

   • If you didn't choose to automatically enable alerts when creating them, go to Enable recommended alerting rules, expand Disabled recommended alerting rules, and select any of the disabled rules. This takes you to the same Edit custom event for alerting page.

     

3. Disable alerting rules.

4. You can disable all alerting rules, or disable or delete them selectively.

   

   • To disable all alerting rules, go to Adjust recommended alerting rules and select Disable all enabled recommended alerting rules.
   • To disable or delete alerting rules selectively, go to Adjust recommended alerting rules and select Metric events. On the Metric events page, you can disable an alert by turning it off in the On/Off column, or you can delete it by selecting x in the Delete column.

   

   If you disable any or all of the alerting rules, you can always re-enable them.

   

Choose Cloud services to be monitored

Once your credentials are saved, you can decide which services will be monitored. To select your preferred services

1. In the Dynatrace menu, go to Settings and select Cloud and virtualization > AWS.
2. Find the instance where you want to perform your monitoring and select to edit the instance.
3. In the Services section, select Manage services.
4. The following services are added by default: Amazon EC2, Amazon Lambda, Amazon RDS, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ALB, Amazon ELB, Amazon S3, and Amazon EBS. You can extend this list by choosing services from the dropdown menu. The full list of services is also available at Amazon Web Services.
5. Select Add service
6. Select the service from the list and then select Add service.
7. Select Save changes to save your configuration.