Install Dynatrace ActiveGate Environment on CentOS | Ubuntu

Dynatrace is a software solution created for intelligent monitoring of your enterprise cloud complexity and accelerates digital transformation. Using the Dynatrace AI causation engine and complete automation, Dynatrace gives you deep insights on the performance of your applications, its underlying infrastructure, and the end user experience.

Dynatrace is created to seamlessly bring infrastructure and cloud, application performance, and digital experience monitoring into an all-in-one, automated solution that’s powered by artificial intelligence. Below are the key monitoring capabilities provided by Dynatrace solution:

• Mobile Application Monitoring
• Real User Monitoring
• Server-side service monitoring
• Network, process, and host monitoring
• Container monitoring
• Root-cause analysis
• Cloud and virtual machine monitoring

The standard infrastructure monitoring with Dynatrace involves setup of client tool called OneAgent. This agent collects and unify all operational and business performance metrics for all types of entities in your environment. This can be applications, servers, databases, and many other services deployed cross each layer of your technology stack (including containers).

What then is Dynatrace ActiveGate?

ActiveGate works as a proxy between Dynatrace OneAgent and Dynatrace Cluster. There are three main purposes of ActiveGate:

The most common use cases are:

• Data routing and network path management between OneAgents and Dynatrace clusters
• Remote monitoring (via APIs) of AWS, Azure, GCP services, CloudFoundry and Kubernetes stacks, VMware engines and IBM Z mainframes
• Private locations for Synthetic monitoring
• Hosting and local execution of many of remote monitoring extensions listed in Dynatrace Hub

The target use case for my deployment is routing OneAgent traffic to Dynatrace. As I intend to use Dynatrace to monitor Kubernetes/OpenShift cluster environments, ActiveGate will be responsible for data routing and network path management between OneAgents and Dynatrace clusters.

Dynatrace ActiveGate Environment Installation

Below are the minimal hardware requirements for the installation of ActiveGate:

• 2 GB free disk space
• 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended)
• 1 dual core processor

With the server requirements satisfied proceed with the next installation steps.

Step 1: Sign in to Dynatrace

The first step is to sign in to Dynatrace.

Step 2: Install Dynatrace ActiveGate Environment on CentOS | Ubuntu

Then navigate to Manage > Deploy Dynatrace:

In the next screen select “Install ActiveGate“.

Choose “Linux” as the installation platform for ActiveGate:

Choose the purpose of ActiveGate installation:

Run the command shown in the target host to download the installer, after which you can verify signature.

Then run the installer with root rights.

chmod +x Dynatrace-ActiveGate-Linux-x86-1.211.139.sh
sudo ./Dynatrace-ActiveGate-Linux-x86-1.211.139.sh

Wait on the installation process to complete:

....
17/03 17:48:41 Dynatrace ActiveGate installer version 1.211.139.20210304-142232, build date 04.03.2021
17/03 17:48:41 Detected init system: 'systemd'
17/03 17:48:41 Checking for previous Ruxit Gateway installations, verifying target installation folder...
17/03 17:48:41 Checking for previous Dynatrace ActiveGate installations, verifying target installation folder...
17/03 17:48:41 Previous Dynatrace Gateway installation NOT detected as a running process.
17/03 17:48:41 No information on previous installation folders found in /etc/init.d.
17/03 17:48:41 Verifying system compatibility...
17/03 17:48:41 Checking system security limits.
17/03 17:48:41 Hard limit of the "Maximum number of open file descriptors" will be set to 500000 for Dynatrace Gateway service
17/03 17:48:41 Remote Plugin Module will be installed by default
17/03 17:48:41 Remote Plugin Modules capability: active
17/03 17:48:41 Additional capabilities will be installed, if newer versions are available on the server.
17/03 17:48:41 Creating user: dtuserag
17/03 17:48:42 Checking access rights to folders...
17/03 17:48:42 Using custom Dynatrace Gateway user: dtuserag:dtuserag
17/03 17:48:42 Installing...
17/03 17:48:47 Installation unpacked successfully
....

Successful installation gives output similar to the one shared below:

...
17/03 17:49:48 Package Dynatrace-Remote-Plugin-Module-Linux-x86-1.211.144.20210305-115326.sh is being installed. Please wait...
        17:49:51 Starting Dynatrace Remote Module...
        17:49:51 oneagentremoteplugin service started
        17:49:51 Checking if remotepluginmodule is connected to server...
        17:49:53 remotepluginmodule connection status: connected to https://127.0.0.1:9999/communication
        17:49:53 remotepluginmodule connected to server.
17/03 17:49:53 Installation of package Dynatrace-Remote-Plugin-Module-Linux-x86-1.211.144.20210305-115326.sh finished successfully.
17/03 17:49:53
17/03 17:49:53
17/03 17:49:53 --------------------------------------------------------------
17/03 17:49:53
17/03 17:49:53 Capabilities(s) installed successfully:
    Dynatrace-Remote-Plugin-Module-Linux-x86-1.211.144.20210305-115326.sh
17/03 17:49:53 Removing old installation log files...
17/03 17:49:53 Installation finished successfully.

ActiveGate listens for traffic from OneAgent on port 9999.

$ grep port /var/lib/dynatrace/gateway/config/config.properties
port-ssl = 9999
port = 9998 #HTTP connection port

Custom parameters settings file:

$ sudo vim /var/lib/dynatrace/gateway/config/custom.properties

Verify the ActiveGate installation under “Deployment Status” > “ActiveGates“

 You can customize ActiveGate directories, during ActiveGate installation, by specifying the following installation parameters:

• INSTALL – executable files, libraries and related files; default /opt/dynatrace
• CONFIG – configuration file; default /var/lib/dynatrace
• LOG – log file; default /var/log/dynatrace
• TEMP – temporary file; default /var/tmp/dynatrace
• PACKAGES_DIR – installation packages for ActiveGate upgrades or for additional capabilities; default /var/lib/dynatrace/packages

For any change restart service:

sudo systemctl restart dynatracegateway.service

References:

• Dynatrace ActiveGate Installation directories
• Dynatrace ActiveGate Configurations
• Dynatrace ActiveGate Documentation