Node.js

Node.js is a server-side framework based on the V8 JavaScript engine by Google. Node.js has an asynchronous execution model and is frequently used for gluing or as a proxy tier within enterprise environments.

Capabilities

Dynatrace provides extensive Node.js monitoring capabilities:

See our supported technologies matrix for details about supported technologies that will be used in conjunction with Node.js.

Support & desupport

Node.js follows an LTS release model.

Each odd-numbered version reaches EOL shortly after each new even-numbered version is released. Each even-numbered version eventually becomes an LTS release. For enterprise production environments, we recommend that you stick to LTS releases.

Whenever a new Node.js major version (even or uneven) is released, we add support for that version.

Dynatrace will follow this support model, but will support each Node.js version at least half a year longer to give our customers time for upgrades.

Node.js version
Vendor released
Vendor End of life
First supported OneAgent version
Last supported OneAgent version
Dynatrace support until
Dynatrace support level
23
2024-10-16
2025-06-01
1.305
-
2025-12-01
Not supported1
22
2024-04-23
2027-04-30
1.295
-
2028-04-30
Supported1
21
2023-10-17
2024-06-01
1.281
1.303
2024-12-01
Supported
20
2023-04-18
2026-04-30
1.271
-
2027-04-30
Supported1
19
2022-10-18
2023-06-01
1.257
1.285
2023-12-01
Not supported
18
2022-04-19
2025-04-30
1.243
-
2026-04-30
Supported2
17
2021-10-19
2022-06-01
1.235
1.265
2022-12-01
Not supported
16
2021-04-20
2023-09-11
1.219
-
2024-09-11
Limited3
15
2020-10-20
2021-06-01
1.207
1.233
2021-12-01
Not supported
14
2020-04-21
2023-04-30
1.195
-
2024-04-30
Limited3
13
2019-10-22
2020-06-01
1.183
1.205
2020-12-01
Not supported
12
2019-04-23
2022-04-30
1.171
-
2023-04-30
Limited3
11
2018-10-23
2019-06-30
1.159
1.181
2019-12-31
Not supported
10
2015-04-24
2021-04-30
1.147
-
2022-04-30
Limited3
9
2017-10-01
2018-06-30
-
1.157
2018-12-31
Not supported
8
2017-05-30
2019-12-31
-
1.239
2020-12-31
Not supported
1
Web Streams, WebSocket Client, and features marked as 'experimental' are not supported.
2
The s390x CPU architecture support requires OneAgent version 1.271+.
3
Limited support: Dynatrace can only solve problems that can be reproduced on supported versions.

Continuous thread analysis for worker threads

Node.js version 12+ OneAgent version 1.251+ Dynatrace version 1.256+

Continuous thread analysis for worker threads can automatically identify CPU-intensive threads and pinpoint scalability issues when work is distributed across many threads so that you can solve performance bottlenecks before your end users are impacted.

Statistics about the main and worker threads:

Node.js worker thread stats

CPU time consumed by the various worker threads:

Node.js worker thread CPU times

To get started with the continuous thread analysis for worker threads, activate the OneAgent features Node.js worker threads monitoring and Node.js code module preloading.

Limitations

Node.js specific metrics (for example, memory, garbage collection, and event-loops) are only reported for the main thread.

Class browsing (required for the custom messaging services of kafkajs) is limited to the main thread.

There is no automatic transaction tracing in place between the main and worker threads. For tracing transactions across threads, you can either use OpenTelemetry tracing or the OneAgent SDK.

Known limitations

  • Due to platform limitations of JavaScript and Node.js, code-level visibility is limited compared to .NET or Java.

  • In conjunction with unsupported third-party modules, context can be lost in asynchronous callbacks. In such cases, please contact a Dynatrace product expert via live chat within your Dynatrace environment.

  • OneAgent version 1.279+ CPU times are not reported for Node.js services. These numbers were misleading, since by design a major part of any operation is handled asynchronously inside the Node.js runtime without the possibility to correlate the actual CPU time to a specific service.

  • Using the NPM module esm in variant 1 for packages might result in reduced visibility (especially if used for the main application script). It's preferable to use variant 2 to preload esm via the -r command line option.

  • There is currently only limited support for ECMAScript modules (aka "ES6 modules"):

    • If the main script file itself is an ECMAScript module OneAgent version 1.219+ with Agent preloading enabled is needed for the OneAgent to be injected into the Node.js process.

    • Instrumentation of ECMAScript modules is currently not available. This limits support for kafkajs in case the user defined entrypoint for the KafkaJs sensor is inside an ECMAScript module.

  • Webpack bundles all modules into a single file by default. OneAgent is unable to instrument bundled modules. To work around this limitation, all modules that need to be instrumented by OneAgent (such as express, mongodb, and pg) need to be externalized in the webpack configuration. For details, see the webpack externals documentation.

  • Using Webpack or other bundlers might also have an impact on automatic vulnerability detection. This is because the software components cannot be detected, as they are hidden behind the bundler configuration and not available at runtime. Only packages that are deployed as external packages can be detected and reported.

Monitoring

See also