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New Dynatrace Operator elevates cloud-native observability for Kubernetes

One key Dynatrace advantage is ease of activation. OneAgent technology simplifies deployment across large enterprises and relieves engineers of the burden of instrumenting their applications by hand. As Kubernetes adoption continues to grow it becomes more important than ever to simplify the activation of observability across workloads without sacrificing the deployment automation that Kubernetes provides. Observability should be as cloud-native as Kubernetes itself.

In late 2018, Dynatrace introduced the OneAgent Operator for ease of activation on Kubernetes. OneAgent Operator uses the Red Hat Operator Framework to deploy, configure, maintain, and upgrade Dynatrace full stack observability across Kubernetes clusters. As its name suggests, OneAgent Operator is devoted to the lifecycle of OneAgent. Other Dynatrace components, like ActiveGate, are deployed separately.

Dynatrace Operator for OneAgent, API monitoring, routing, and more

Today we’re proud to announce the new Dynatrace Operator, designed from the ground up to handle the lifecycle of OneAgent, Kubernetes API monitoring, OneAgent traffic routing, and all future containerized componentry such as the forthcoming extension framework.

If you’re new to Dynatrace this should feel like a breath of fresh air compared to existing commercial and open-source solutions. Activating end-to-end Kubernetes observability at scale has never been easier.

Existing Dynatrace customers can now migrate from VM-based ActiveGates to Kubernetes pods that support necessary ActiveGate capabilities. Both Kubernetes monitoring and routing capabilities now use a containerized architecture and are managed by the new Dynatrace Operator. More ActiveGate capabilities will be available as Kubernetes pods later this year.

In addition to deploying ActiveGate capabilities as pods, the new Dynatrace Operator also includes:

  • A simplified custom resource definition (CRD) for all Dynatrace components. No need to repeat API endpoints or tokens across OneAgents and API monitors.
  • Seamless upgrades and full compatibility with existing OneAgent Operator installations. For details on migration from existing OneAgent Operators to the new Dynatrace Operator see Migrate to Dynatrace Operator – Kubernetes.
  • One parameter toggles for different capabilities like Kubernetes API monitoring or OneAgent traffic routing. Containerized ActiveGate capabilities are deployed without unnecessary complexity.
  • A foundation for delivering cloud-native injection using the best of both worlds: Automatic “app-only” via Kubernetes admission controllers along with OneAgent Kubernetes monitoring. See details further down in this article.

Increasing team autonomy across Kubernetes-empowered organizations

The new Dynatrace Operator, capable of managing all aspects of Kubernetes observability, is also great news for teams who want autonomy in deploying workloads to the world’s most successful container platform.

Autonomy is a big deal, especially in large organizations that want to give ownership of Dynatrace environments to teams instead of forcing them to file tickets each time they want to monitor something new. A great example of this push towards autonomy is SAP. Tim Gerlach, Product Owner Application Performance Monitoring at SAP, has this to say about this new release:

“The new Dynatrace Operator further accelerates SAP’s adoption of Dynatrace on Kubernetes by expanding the level of observability our workloads require. Now that the Dynatrace Operator manages the lifecycle of OneAgent, CodeModules, and ActiveGate capabilities, our teams can activate and control their own environments without external dependencies. Our teams are more autonomous, which means they can deliver innovation faster to their customers.”

Example Dynatrace problem ticket
Example Dynatrace problem ticket

Getting Started with all-in-one observability

With the release of Dynatrace version 1.215, getting started with the new Dynatrace Operator only takes a few minutes for new clusters. Our updated deployment guide will lead you through the process of creating the new custom resource, which deploys everything you need for all-in-one observability on Kubernetes. Customers using the existing OneAgent Operator can migrate to the new Dynatrace Operator by following our migration guide.

Whether you’re activating a new cluster, or migrating from an existing one, the new Dynatrace Operator serves both sides of your organization’s application deployment process. In addition to world-class Dynatrace Kubernetes workload and cluster monitoring for DevOps teams, application teams gain tremendous value with Dynatrace Pure-Path and deep code-level visibility into the performance of Kubernetes pods running Java, .NET, PHP, Node.js, and Golang containers. Only Dynatrace provides this level of of infrastructure and application observability in one comprehensive solution.

What’s ahead

The new Dynatrace Operator streamlines lifecycle management for a handful of different Kubernetes deployments via the new custom resource. This does not yet include the new webhook injection mechanism introduced for automatic app-only injection. We’re looking forward to introducing this type of injection for the new Dynatrace Operator, injection rules by label, and infrastructure monitoring of Kubernetes nodes, by summer 2021.

Getting started with Dynatrace on Kubernetes has never been easier