Today’s multicloud environments consist of hundreds of applications, hundreds of thousands of hosts and containers, and use an ever-increasing number of technologies.

Still, a single unmonitored host can become a weak link, causing system failures and security breaches.

Therefore, teams need a holistic and complete overview of the evolving IT landscape to stay ahead of potential issues. To address this need, companies are investing in unified observability and security platforms to consolidate and prevent tool sprawl. This unified approach reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO), cutting down on the overhead costs associated with managing multiple standalone tools and training costs and simplifying procurement and vendor management.

However, because different applications and services have different observability and security requirements, an observability platform needs to provide easy manageability and high flexibility to cover all use cases effectively and cost-effectively. Such a unified, enterprise-wide observability and security platform can ensure health, mitigate risk, and enable collaboration and automation.

Today, we’re proud to announce that companies can now ensure full visibility across their entire IT ecosystem with two enhancements of the Dynatrace platform. This includes the ability to tailor the observability and security coverage to the requirements of different application tiers and systems.

Identify and remove blind spots and monitoring gaps with the new Discovery & Coverage app to mitigate risks

The first step to enhance system reliability is identifying and removing blind spots by eliminating monitoring gaps. Blind spots can conceal underlying issues that can cause unexpected system failures or performance issues if left unchecked. Removing blind spots proactively prevents security incidents and ensures that performance metrics reflect the true state of the environment.

The new Discovery & Coverage app helps achieve these full monitoring coverage goals. It surfaces any monitoring gaps, whether they are unmonitored or under-monitored hosts or clouds, and automatically assesses host criticality, combining insights from Smartscape, cloud platforms, and eBPF Service Discovery.

Detected gaps can then be closed and coverage assured, with just a few clicks. Once a host is monitored, it becomes part of Smartscape^®, the topological view, mapping out all the connections between parts of your ecosystem, and fuels Davis^® AI. Davis provides automatic anomaly detection and root-cause analysis, precisely pinpointing performance and security issues and enabling the automatic generation of detailed tickets with automatic routing to the appropriate team.

Hybrid cloud discovery

Upon the first start, the app checks if there are monitored hosts in your public and private clouds and if the integrations are configured correctly. If a specific cloud is not adequately monitored, the cloud integration can easily be set up.

The Host coverage page shows a quick overview of which clouds are connected, how many hosts were discovered, and how many hosts are monitored by Dynatrace. The app automatically calculates the coverage priority for each app.

Figure 1: Host coverage overview

This data is used to complete the topology in Smartscape. If a host is discovered in a cloud and is not yet monitored by OneAgent, the app lists it as an unmonitored host and recommends OneAgent installation.

Select Install OneAgents to access simple prompts that you can copy and paste for rapid OneAgent installation.

Efficient service discovery and automatic recommendations

As soon as OneAgent is deployed on previously unmonitored hosts, it shows all findings gathered with lightweight eBPF Service Discovery.

The Discovery findings page then shows the following columns:

• Status shows if the host is under-monitored or if any actions are recommended.
• Findings show if the hosts have external services, if there are any unmonitored technologies detected that can or should be monitored, or if the host has security concerns.

Figure 2: Discovery findings

The Recommendation column shows quick actions that teams can take, such as activating extensions to monitor discovered services (including databases, message queues, and other technologies) or quickly changing the monitoring mode for a group of hosts.

OneAgent Foundation & Discovery mode adds flexibility for even more monitoring scenarios

In large IT ecosystems, different requirements for different systems lead to multiple monitoring scenarios.

For instance, critical hosts usually demand more observability and security compared with less essential tiers. Different application components can require distinct monitoring approaches depending on their specific needs. Moreover, different teams within an organization can have specific sets of requirements, further underscoring the need for a platform that can cater to a diverse and evolving set of monitoring needs.

Foundation & Discovery enables customers to extend in-depth visibility into tier 2 and tier 3 applications, allowing IT teams to maintain robust oversight without incurring prohibitive additional costs for broad Full-Stack or Infrastructure Monitoring mode deployments.

This complements the recent introduction of an hourly rate for Infrastructure Monitoring with Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS), and predictable pod-hour-based pricing for Kubernetes, making sure that you pay only for the hosts and pods that you’re actively monitoring.

The right OneAgent mode for every use case

Complementing the Full-Stack and Infrastructure Monitoring OneAgent modes with the new Foundation & Discovery mode, Dynatrace enables customers to choose the level of observability and security insights and, therefore, the respective price point based on requirements:

• Full-Stack monitoring offers the entire scope of Dynatrace capabilities, including application observability with tracing and profiling, as well as topology discovery, host criticality, basic monitoring, host process details, detailed disk analysis, network analysis, memory analysis, extensions to custom technologies (opt-in), custom metrics, log management (opt-in), tracing and profiling, and application security (opt-in).
• Infrastructure monitoring mode offers the same capabilities except tracing and profiling.
• The newly added Foundation & Discovery mode offers topology discovery, host criticality, and basic monitoring with the option for log management and application security.

Figure 3: OneAgent modes overview

This flexibility allows customers to address all use cases and application tiers cost-effectively.

Foundation & Discovery

Foundation & Discovery features automated eBPF Service Discovery, which provides complete accuracy in Smartscape and allows Dynatrace to automatically categorize hosts based on their criticality.

It includes Topology Discovery, Host Criticality, and Basic Monitoring, with opt-ins for Log Management and Application Security.

Basic Monitoring

• Host health includes fundamental host health indicators, such as whether the host is up/down, and other key metrics, including CPU, memory, disk, and network.
• Filesystem monitoring includes more fundamental host health indicators, such as disk usage.
• OS services monitoring includes health indicators, such as whether OS services have crashed or stopped.

Log Management (optional)

Opting into Log Management unlocks the convenience of log data collection using OneAgent for all application tiers. OneAgent automatically discovers, ingests, and contextualizes logs from a vast array of technologies, enabling analytics and automation for observability and security use cases.

Application Security (optional)

Extending Security Protection and Security Analytics to all tiers and hosts is paramount to mitigating risks. Opting into Application Security provides protection with the flip of a switch.

According to Gartner, 45% of organizations will face attacks on software supply chains by 2025. This trend is also confirmed by numerous customer requests for a cost-efficient way to apply security protection to tier 2 and tier 3 applications, including applications developed by third parties like commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and open source software (OSS).

Foundation & Discovery enables customers to implement security protection across all tiers, including runtime vulnerability analytics (RVA) and runtime application protection (RAP).

Combined with Log Management, Foundation & Discovery also enables security analytics for threat detection, forensics, and incident response.

Current availability

Foundation & Discovery is available on Dynatrace SaaS for accounts with a Dynatrace Platform Subscription and will be introduced for Dynatrace Managed accounts in the future.

Gain full visibility into your environment now

Start using the Foundation & Discovery mode and try the Discovery & Coverage app now in your environment for full visibility.

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