Rebuilt OneAgent installer for Windows provides more efficient installation

This short blog post is a follow up to the announcement we made on May 6, 2019:
OneAgent for Windows—Enhancements to *.msi-based deployment.

One of our design principles is to make sure that Dynatrace is as easy to set up and use as possible. These aren’t just empty words. We know from numerous engagements with customers that Dynatrace delivers exceptionally short time-to-value, which can be counted in minutes rather than days.

The installation (and automatic update) of OneAgent is an important part of the delivery process. The current installation scripts are near flawless in their reliability, automation, and intuitiveness. In order to maintain our high-quality standards, we’re constantly improving these scripts, and in many cases, like the enhancements described in this short announcement, there’s more to them than meets the eye.

Improved OneAgent installation reliability for hardened Windows settings

In short, over the last several months, we’ve completely rebuilt the architecture of the OneAgent installer for Windows. Without diving into unnecessary technical details, the new solution is expected to be much more reliable and cover a number of edge cases. It now provides reliability and ease of deployment even in tricky situations like hardened Windows OS settings or in the presence of strict antivirus rules.

Smaller network and Dynatrace cluster storage footprint

The new installer of OneAgent for Windows is also significantly smaller than before. By utilizing a different compression approach, we managed to reduce the *.exe installer size from ~90 MB to ~75 MB. This is the size of the actual installer file only. For the installation process itself, there are additional space requirements for Windows.

One installation artifact instead of two

We’ve also eliminated the *.msi artifact from Dynatrace completely, replacing it with a mechanism that unpacks the *.msi file from the *.exe installer. If you haven’t done so already, please read about recent enhancements to MSI-based deployments on Windows.

All of these changes effectively reduce the size of the Windows installer on Dynatrace by over 60%, which makes the installer faster to download, too. So you’ll be able to save both on the size of Dynatrace disk space as well as on the associated network transfer footprint and time required to move the data.

We’re confident that you’ll appreciate the hard work that went into this release, even if (or perhaps because) most of the changes should be completely transparent to you. As always, if you have any feedback or comments, please let us know.