Improve Cloud Foundry observability with the immutable OneAgent BOSH release

Cloud Foundry BOSH is a powerful tool that combines release engineering, deployment, and life cycle management of distributed software in the cloud. While BOSH is platform agnostic, it’s the standard vehicle for rolling out and managing Cloud Foundry on virtualized infrastructure, across cloud providers.

BOSH loves YAML (so it’s in good company with Kubernetes) and follows a declarative approach for defining the desired state of Cloud Foundry’s various components as well as the underlying virtual machines, networks, and storage devices. To accomplish this, BOSH uses its own release format, a BOSH release, which contains instructions and installation files for deploying and managing any Cloud Foundry environment, wherever hosted.

Dynatrace first shipped the OneAgent BOSH release in May 2018 using a lightweight approach for a minimal BOSH release. Today we’re happy to announce that OneAgent version 1.177 includes an immutable OneAgent BOSH release.

Gain full control over deployments with the new, fully contained OneAgent BOSH release

This new BOSH release takes advantage of BOSH’s life cycle. You can simply upload a chosen OneAgent BOSH release version to BOSH’s blobstore (in the same way that any other BOSH release is uploaded) and deploy it as an addon using a BOSH runtime config. This fully contained approach has the advantage of being immutable, giving operators full control over what is deployed and when. To ensure seamless integrations, we disabled the OneAgent autoupdate capabilities, but you can still use the existing lightweight approach.

Lightweight vs. fully contained release—what’s the difference?

In the lightweight approach, BOSH downloads the latest OneAgent from the Internet. The lightweight approach installs a preconfigured OneAgent at deployment time, guarantees the latest OneAgent binaries, and allows for fully automated OneAgent-controlled version updates.

While this lightweight architecture has the advantage of staying current with latest releases, many customers need greater control over the OneAgent BOSH deployment life cycle, especially for enforcing consistency across test and staging environments. For these customers, the fully contained BOSH release is the alternative solution; it comes with complete packages, binaries, and installation files, all in the same archive.

Included in the fully contained OneAgent BOSH release

• An immutable OneAgent, packaged natively in BOSH
• Full automation via integration with the Dynatrace API
• Dedicated releases for Windows and Linux stemcells
• Preconfigured releases for single environments versus generic releases for staged environments

How to deploy it

A download URL for the new fully contained OneAgent BOSH release is available in your Dynatrace environment. Simply navigate to the Environment API page and look at the Deployment section. After downloading the BOSH release, you can upload and deploy your release as a BOSH addon. The immutable OneAgent addon must include certain keys as described in the documentation.

Other requirements are:

• Dynatrace version 1.178
• OneAgent and ActiveGate version 1.177

Leading the way

Supporting native BOSH packaging and immutable OneAgent releases are prime examples of Dynatrace leadership in monitoring and observability for Cloud Foundry. After celebrating the release with our engineering team, we’re now free to invest in further innovations such as auto-container monitoring for Windows as well as expanded events and metric support in Kubernetes. Subscribe to our blog at the bottom of the news page to keep an eye on what’s coming.