Organize Cloud Foundry deployments by tags

Dynatrace provides the ability to define tags for CloudFoundry application process groups and services via any user-provided Dynatrace Cloud Foundry service that’s bound to your application. This enables you to automatically organize and filter all monitored Cloud Foundry application components.

Recommendation

Defining tags in the environment itself has its uses. However, we don't recommended it as a general purpose solution. The reason is that this is cumbersome and requires a lot of preplanning. Making changes later isn't easy either. Use it with caution.

We recommend that you define additional metadata at the deployed system. For CloudFoundry apps this can also be done via a user-provided Dynatrace Cloud Foundry service that’s bound to your application.

This enables you to use automated tagging rules, based on existing or custom metadata, to define your filter sets for charts, alerting, and more. These tags and rules can be changed and adapted any time and will apply almost immediately without any change to the monitored environment or applications.

Define Cloud Foundry service tags for multiple applications

To define Dynatrace tags, you can leverage one or more Cloud Foundry service instances that have the name dynatrace as a substring. For example:

cf cups dynatrace-tags -p '{ "tag key": "tag value", "tag key": "tag value"}'

You’re prompted automatically to provide values for certain tags (for example, tag:region>eu-central-1). Dynatrace supports both Cloud Foundry labels and Cloud Foundry key-value tags. For example, the tag tanzu in the example above is used to label all applications running within a VMware Tanzu environment—so this tag doesn’t include a value. The key-value tag region in the example holds the region of the AWS account that was used to deploy the Cloud Foundry environment.

You can easily update your user-provided Cloud Foundry services with new values (for example, tag:region>eu-west-2) or additional tags:

cf uups dynatrace-tags -p "tag:tanzu, tag:region, tag:newtag"

To exploit the service instance dynatrace-tags above, you must bind the instance to your application (for example, spring-music):

cf bs spring-music dynatrace-tags

Define tags for specific Cloud Foundry applications

Additionally, Dynatrace automatically detects tags that are provided to applications via Cloud Foundry environment variables. For instance, you can provide the environment variable DT_TAGS in the environment block of your application manifest but you can also set DT_TAGS using the cf command set-env:

---
applications:
- name: spring-music
  memory: 1G
  random-route: true
  path: build/libs/spring-music.jar
  services:
   - dynatrace-service
env:
  DT_TAGS: hotfix
cf set-env spring-music DT_TAGS "hotfix"

Both examples above attach the tag hotfix to all monitored processes that are related to the application spring-music.

Leverage Cloud Foundry tags in your Dynatrace environment

Cloud Foundry tags are searchable via Dynatrace search. This allows you to easily find and inspect the monitoring results of related processes that are running in your Cloud Foundry environment.

Cloud Foundry tags also integrate seamlessly with Dynatrace filters. For example, you can easily filter technologies or problems using Cloud Foundry tags. You can also leverage Cloud Foundry tags when setting up fine-grained problem alerting profiles.

Limitations

Dynatrace buildpack integration for IBM WebSphere Liberty can currently only support a single service instance that uses the name dynatrace as a substring. However, you can easily provide tags when creating this single service instance for Dynatrace:

cf cups dynatrace-service -p "environmentid, apitoken, tag:tanzu, tag:region"

If you already have a service instance for Dynatrace in place you can update it with new values or additional tags:

cf uups dynatrace-service -p "environmentid, apitoken, tag:tanzu, tag:region, tag:newtag"

For further details on creating a user-provided service for Dynatrace see How do I monitor Cloud Foundry applications?

The Dynatrace Node.js, Java, PHP, and Staticfile buildpack integrations allow you to leverage not only one, but several service instances to define Dynatrace tags.

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