Header background

Automated full-stack monitoring and distributed tracing for Red Hat OpenShift 4.0

Red Hat just announced the availability of their OpenShift 4.0 container platform at the Red Hat Summit in Boston. We worked closely with our friends from Red Hat to provide a seamless experience of our software intelligence platform for the new OpenShift 4.0 release. This is why we’re proud to announce fully automated and AI-powered full-stack monitoring for OpenShift 4.0 environments from day one of its release.

Red Hat significantly changed the way to roll-out and manage OpenShift to provide improved agility for digital enterprises. It enables enterprises to more quickly develop, deploy and scale cloud native applications by delivering a smarter Kubernetes platform. Traditional monitoring systems cannot keep up with the speed of change in those highly dynamic large-scale container environments.  They fail to understand the deployment architecture and dependencies and aren’t able to deal with the ephemeral nature of containers.

Full-stack monitoring requires coverage of the entire environment—from the cluster node level to container insights, distributed tracing and code-level visibility—and is vital in microservices architectures to track health and performance of applications across ephemeral containers.

Automated distributed tracing, deep monitoring and AI-powered answers for OpenShift 4.0 platforms with CRI-O containers

Red Hat has re-platformed their Kubernetes distribution with the release of OpenShift 4.0 and now leverages lightweight CRI-O containers for running and managing application containers.

Dynatrace provides AI-powered answers for environments based on OpenShift 4.0 where other solutions go blind. Degradations in service, anomalies in behavior, and precise user impact  plus the underlying root causes are automatically detected.

OneAgent Operator uses Kubernetes-native means to roll out OneAgent to OpenShift nodes. Once deployed, OneAgent automatically injects the OneAgent bits into application containers to provide you with automated visibility into CRI-O containers and traces.

Deploy Dynatrace directly from the OpenShift OperatorHub

We integrated OneAgent Operator with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, and together with the Red Hat team, we worked on the certification of OneAgent Operator.

So Dynatrace is now available as a certified operator in the OpenShift OperatorHub, a pool of high-quality operators for managing Kubernetes-native deployments. Dynatrace is the only monitoring solution available that gives you visibility into nodes, containers, and deployed microservices down to the code-level and requests without requiring you to tinker with application images or code to get deep monitoring for your applications.

Understand cluster nodes utilization over time

Dynatrace even helps you to understand the actual utilization of your cluster nodes in OpenShift 4, so that you can scale the size of the cluster to your needs. The built-in filter mechanism allows you to select cluster nodes with a certain role or other node labels for your analysis. From the analysis page, you can jump directly to the node view and inspect all containers that are running in the pods on a particular node.

How to get started

It’s never been easier and as seamless and frictionless as it is with the Dynatrace OperatorHub integration to get full-stack monitoring for an entire OpenShift cluster. Everything you need to create a namespace/project, create a secret for the required tokens, and to roll out the certified OneAgent Operator is available from the OperatorHub.

Alternatively, you can also leverage the oc CLI to roll-out OneAgent Operator. For this approach, please see the instructions provided in Dynatrace Help.

While OneAgent gives you unrivaled visibility into nodes, containers, microservices, and traces, you’ll get additional visibility into the node level by leveraging the Kubernetes API integration for OpenShift.

What’s next

We’re already working on further enhancements for OpenShift and Kubernetes. These enhancements include:

  • Integration of the new Kubernetes/OpenShift cluster metrics with custom charting
  • Native integration of Kubernetes/OpenShift node events with the Davis® AI causation engine
  • Universal container-level metrics for resource contention analytics

There’s a lot more to come in regards to our Kubernetes/OpenShift support. We’d like to include you in the process of prioritizing upcoming features, so please check out the planned enhancements at Dynatrace answers and share your feedback with us.