Save build time and make life easier with the new Android auto-instrumentation

It’s only been a few months since we announced the Preview program for our super-fast Android auto-instrumentation—a great enhancement that’ll make your monitoring life easier and save you a lot of build time. More than 40 customers have joined the program and provided their feedback. Today we’re happy to announce that Dynatrace Android auto-instrumentation is Generally Available.

Monitor your Android apps more quickly and easily than ever

Here’s a quick overview of what you get with this enhancement:

Easy integration into AppBundle projects

Modern Android projects contain several individual modules and projects to support new features like Instant Apps. The new auto-instrumentation was designed for this, and by providing you with a single Gradle snippet to insert into the project root Gradle file, we believe it’ll be easy for you to monitor all your apps.

New and flexible DSL

With the new and flexible Domain Specific Language (DSL), you can instrument even the most complex enterprise-app builds, allowing you to use completely different configurations for every build variant. For example, you might instrument only your release builds but not your debug builds. You might send the monitoring data for the free version of your app to one Dynatrace environment while deploying OneAgent for Mobile for the paid version of your app. Any configuration is now possible! Have a look at the details in Dynatrace Help.

Great instrumentation speed

The instrumentation speed is barely noticeable even during development builds and debugging.

A completely new Dynatrace Android Gradle plugin

There were some major changes involved, so we decided to release a completely new Dynatrace Android Gradle plugin, leaving the old plugin untouched. Existing projects that use the old plugin won’t be affected, but if you instrument a new app and follow the instructions in the instrumentation wizard, you’ll automatically use the new plugin. The new wizard also allows you to copy Groovy or Kotlin snippets (see the image below).

Note: The new auto-instrumentation requires you to insert the Gradle snippet into your project root Gradle file instead of the app module Gradle file.

Please refer to Dynatrace Help for more details about the new instrumentation. If you already have an instrumented app and would like to migrate to the new plugin, you can follow this guide.

To learn more about the new features and why the new auto-instrumentation is so great, read our Preview announcement blog post.