Introduction to Dynatrace: Elevate Your Application Monitoring Game.
Tags: dynatrace, devops, monitoring, into
Published: 2023-09-23 12:16:06

**What is Dynatrace?**
Dynatrace is an application performance monitoring (APM) tool, its helps organizations in tracking and improving the performance of their software applications.
In simpler words, Dynatrace helps companies keep an eye on their application and websites to make sure they're working properly and accessible smoothly. dynatrace does this by collecting data on how the application is performing, identifying any issues, and providing in detail information. This helps organizations to ensure that their applications are running smoothly, which is important for delivering a good user experience.
Dynatrace can be used to monitor and optimize the performance of various types of software applications, infrastructure, and user experience, helping you to make sure a positive user experience, reduce downtime, and optimize costs.

**For example,** you have a web application that serve to the thousand users and with dyanatrace you can monitor the performance of your application , and you can identify the slowness or the response time.
its provide insights how the application performing including application code , network calls etc

**Dynatrace provide some capabilities for monitoring and analyzing the performance of your application as follow:**

- Real User monitoring  It analyzes the performance of the application when       the user interacts with the web application whether its is from mobile device or via desktop

- Mobile app monitoring  Dynatrace supports real user monitoring to the mobile app also, but the process of monitoring the mobile app is different from browser monitoring because the platform is different. 

- Server-side monitoring  The application which runs based on the web pages and the pages served by the web server like Apache or Tomcat or any web container, the request sent to the specific server is an example of server-side.

-  Cloud and virtual machine monitoring  The process of tracking and managing the performance, availability, and resource utilization of cloud-based infrastructure and virtual machine.

-  Container monitoring  this involves monitoring and managing the performance, health, and process utilization of containerized applications and container infrastructure.


![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/fz0zj4d3cp385aeevi78.png)
The above picture shows the things which can do with dynatrace

**How does dynatrace work?**

**Automatic discovery:** Dynatrace's PurePath technology automatically discovers every component and dependency of an application. For example, let's say you have a web application that includes a web server, an application server, a database, and a caching layer. Dynatrace's PurePath technology would automatically discover all these components and their dependencies.

**Modeling:** Once Dynatrace has discovered all the components, its Smartscape technology models the behaviour and interactions between them. This allows Dynatrace to understand how each component affects the performance of the entire system. In our example, Dynatrace's Smartscape technology would model how requests flow through the web server, application server, database, and caching layer.

**Monitoring:** Dynatrace's OneAgent technology continuously monitors the behavior of each component, collecting and unifying operational and business performance metrics for all types of entities in the application environment. In our example, Dynatrace's OneAgent technology would collect metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, and network traffic for each component.

**Artificial intelligence:** Dynatrace's AI engine, Davis, uses artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to analyze the data collected by OneAgent and identify anomalies and problems. For example, if the CPU usage of the application server suddenly spikes, Davis would alert you to the issue and provide insights into the root cause.

**Full-stack monitoring:** All of these technologies work together to provide full-stack monitoring of the application environment. This allows you to see how each component affects the performance of the entire system and quickly identify and resolve issues.

**_“Dynatrace has an Automatic discovery, full-stack monitoring, AI- analysis, and scalability that makes it a unique and powerful monitoring solution than other monitoring solutions.”_**

**Monitoring Environment** where one agent send the capture data from server where Dynatrace is installed and send it to the monitoring env where the user can see the data in better view on the dashboard, charts, and reports. 
we can setup multiple env monitoring for prod or dedicated developer or on the staging area

**How actual data is present in the form of visual, for more refer below link**

https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/get-started/dynatrace-ui/interact-visualizations
Here is a quick start:

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/na2csa0du05u99msq9o0.png)

**Synthetic vs RUM Monitoring** 

Synthetic and RUM these are two distinct monitoring type that are used to get insights into the performance and health of the application

**Synthetic monitoring** involves reproducing the user interaction with the application to test its performance under different conditions. usually, synthetic monitor used automated scripts to test the user interaction with an application, like visiting a website and clicking on some content on the site.
This monitoring identifies any issue with the new release application before runs to the live production if identify an issue it’s easier to rollout  from production or other environment.

For Example let’s consider any e-commerce website where synthetic monitor place and users interact with website like visiting a site, selecting any item, adding that item to cards and checkout that item, and finally payment for the item. If any issue occurs during this procedure synthetic monitor detects that issue and reports, it to the operation or monitoring team in the form of alerts with problems, so that the team can investigate further.

**Another is RUM (Real User Monitoring)** as the name suggest this monitor involves collecting and analyzing the real user interaction with an application. Like how the user interacts with the application via desktop, mobile or any specific browser to the applications and provides information of user experience, server response time, page load time, any error occurrence, and network I/O all insights get in the form of matrices. This monitoring provides an accurate picture of how users are using the application.
both synthetic and RUM monitoring plays an important role in application monitoring and can be used together to get every detail of the application.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/12kzt2firw3rsho99x9f.png)


Conclusion:

In the end, dynatrace is an advanced application performance monitoring tool that helps the organization to get every single detail of their application in one dashboard and in a graphical manner, it provides real-time visibility into applications, infrastructure, and user experiences. Dynatrace has many features like full-stack monitoring, AI- analysis, and scalability that make it a unique and powerful monitoring tool that helps businesses improve satisfaction with clients.