ActiveGate FIPS compliance

ActiveGate version 1.315+

What is FIPS?

The Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) is "a standard for adoption and use by federal departments and agencies that has been developed within the Information Technology Laboratory and published by NIST, a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. A FIPS covers some topic in information technology to achieve a common level of quality or some level of interoperability" (source: NIST glossary).

FIPS compliance means that a product adheres to all security requirements imposed by the standard.

ActiveGate FIPS-compliant mode

ActiveGate deployed in FIPS-compliant mode uses FIPS-certified cryptographic libraries:

Amazon Corretto Crypto Provider 2.4.1 (which uses AWS-LC-FIPS 2.x as its cryptographic module, see Certificate #4816)
BouncyCastle 2.0.0 (see Certificate #4743)

ActiveGate purposes compatibility

Purpose

x86-64

arm64

Routing-monitoring

Synthetic monitoring in a private location

z/OS monitoring

excluding Extension Execution Controller module (same as regular, non-FIPS ActiveGate).

refer to Requirements and limitations for Synthetic FIPS compliance.

Host-based ActiveGate deployment

FIPS-compliant mode can be enabled during ActiveGate installation. For details, see Customize ActiveGate installation on Linux.

Requirements

Linux x86-64 or ARM64 (AArch64)
Operating system with FIPS-compliant mode enabled
- The ActiveGate installer verifies the configuration of the operating system by checking whether the FIPS-compliant mode status stored in /proc/sys/crypto/fips_enabled evaluates to value of 1
- If the ActiveGate installer is started in FIPS-compliant mode while the operating system does not have FIPS-compliant mode enabled, the installer stops and exits with an error

Containerized ActiveGate deployment

Containerized ActiveGate deployments rely on FIPS-compliant images, which are available for the following architectures:

x86-64
ARM64 (AArch64)

Container registries

FIPS-compliant ActiveGate images are available in our supported public registries with the image tag suffix -fips.

Example: public.ecr.aws/dynatrace/dynatrace-activegate:1.315.70.20241127-162512-fips

See Configure DynaKube to use images from public registry for details on how to instruct Dynatrace Operator to use images from the public registry.

Verification of FIPS-compliant mode

To verify whether ActiveGate is running in FIPS-compliant mode, look up the following entry in the ActiveGate logs (see below how to access logs depending on the ActiveGate deployment type):

2025-06-10 12:16:14 UTC INFO    [<tenant>] [FipsDetector] FIPS mode active: true

When FIPS mode active is true, all libraries and configuration related to FIPS compliance are properly initialized and ActiveGate is running in FIPS-compliant mode.

If ActiveGate was installed in FIPS-compliant mode or a FIPS-compliant image was used, but the initialization of FIPS libraries fails or required configuration is missing, ActiveGate cancels its startup and writes the following entries to the log file:

ActiveGate FIPS mode initialization failed

Additionally, a log line describes the specific reason causing the initialization failure.

Accessing logs in host-based deployment

ActiveGate log files have the pattern dynatracegateway.0.<number>.log and can be found in the ActiveGate logs directory (see ActiveGate directories).

Accessing logs in containerized deployment

Logs from containerized ActiveGates can be retrieved using the following command: kubectl -n <NAMESPACE> logs statefulset.apps/<DYNAKUBE_NAME>-activegate In case there are multiple replicas configured, logs from a single pod will be returned.

To get logs from a specific pod, use the following command: kubectl -n <NAMESPACE> logs pod/<DYNAKUBE_NAME>-activegate-<REPLICA_NUMBER>