The functionality offered by these types of ActiveGates depends on the functional modules that are currently installed or configured.
A Dynatrace ActiveGate establishes Dynatrace presence—a Dynatrace component—in your local network. In this way Dynatrace ActiveGate allows you to reduce your interaction with Dynatrace to one single point—available locally. Besides convenience, this solution also optimizes traffic volume and reduces the complexity of network connections, and consequently reduces cost. It also ensures the security of sealed networks.
(module: OneAgent routing) ActiveGate knows about the runtime structure of your Dynatrace environment and routes messages from OneAgent instances to the correct server endpoints.
(module: OneAgent routing) ActiveGate collects messages from OneAgent instances and builds bulks, which are then sent in compressed form to Dynatrace Servers. This can reduce network overhead considerably, depending on the number of OneAgent instances communicating with the ActiveGate and on the amount of data transferred by them.
(module: OneAgent routing) ActiveGate authenticates OneAgent requests (SSL handshake and environment ID authentication).
(module: OneAgent routing) In case OneAgents don't have access to the internet, you should install an ActiveGate to serve as a single access point, rather than opening the firewall for multiple hosts running OneAgents. This approach greatly reduces the effort of managing and maintaining firewall and/or proxy configuration settings.
Memory dumps come from OneAgents and thus can be considered a part of the routing functionality of ActiveGate.
(module: Memory dumps) Dynatrace supports both automatic and manual capture and analysis of memory dumps on monitored hosts. Memory dumps need to be stored in a centralized location for download and analysis. Since such dumps are often large and can contain sensitive data, Dynatrace doesn't allow you to upload dumps to the Dynatrace cluster in the cloud. Instead you should set up an ActiveGate and configure it to serve as a host for memory dumps. The Dynatrace UI provides you with download URLs for the ActiveGate REST API that serves the dumps.
(module: AWS) AWS service monitoring is a resource-intensive task. Therefore, to monitor more than 2,000 AWS resources, you must install an ActiveGate and configure AWS monitoring.
(module: Cloud Foundry)
To connect your Cloud Foundry foundations to Dynatrace, you're required to install an ActiveGate instance to complement Cloud Foundry process- and host-level metrics collected by Dynatrace OneAgent with additional metadata and metrics pulled from the Cloud Foundry API. This integration allows you to use the Cloud Foundry overview page as well as the automatic detection of your Cloud Foundry organizations in addition to other Cloud Foundry process properties like space, space ID, application, application ID, and instance index.
Environment ActiveGates only
(module: Kubernetes) To connect your Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters to Dynatrace to take advantage of the dedicated Kubernetes/OpenShift overview page, you need to run an ActiveGate in your environment.
(module: Azure) To integrate Azure monitoring data, a dedicated ActiveGate is required to poll metadata and metrics from Azure APIs. This integration enables monitoring of Azure Services (especially for cloud services where we can't install OneAgent) and also monitoring through the Dynatrace UI.
Environment ActiveGates only
(modules: Extensions 1.0, Extensions 2.0)
With ActiveGate extensions, you can extend Dynatrace monitoring to any remote technology that exposes an interface, where OneAgent installation is not an option. For example, PaaS technologies, network devices, or cloud technologies. ActiveGate extensions (aka remote plugins) are executed on ActiveGates and can acquire metrics and topology information from remote sources, thereby fully integrating remote technology monitoring into Dynatrace Smartscape and problem detection.
(module: Database insights) Database insights adds an infrastructure perspective to your database monitoring. With additional data fetched from the database layer, you are able to resolve performance problems that are rooted deep in the database.
(module: VMware) An ActiveGate can poll your vCenter or standalone ESXi hosts to obtain information about all important resources that ESXi servers provision to your virtual machines (for example, CPU usage, memory consumption, and data-store related activity on your VMware platform). To acquire this information, Dynatrace needs a component installed in your environment that has access to the vCenter API.
Dynatrace ActiveGate provides endpoints for accessing Dynatrace API. The types of API calls listed below are handled or pre-processed on the ActiveGate, before involving the Dynatrace Cluster. Other API calls are forwarded directly to the Dynatrace Cluster.
ActiveGate supports calls to all the endpoints of the v1 as well as v2 versions of the Dynatrace Configuration and Environment APIs.
(module: Log Monitoring) With Log Monitoring as a part of the Dynatrace platform, you gain direct access to the log content of all your mission-critical processes. You can create custom log metrics for smarter and faster troubleshooting. You will be able to understand log data in the context of your full stack, including real user impacts.
(module: HTTP Metric API) Metric ingestion provides you a with a simple way to push any custom metrics to Dynatrace. You can further refine your metrics into categories.
(module: OTLP Ingest) You can send OpenTelemetry trace data (traces and spans) in OTLP format to Dynatrace via an API available on Dynatrace ActiveGate. The ingested spans are integrated into PurePath® distributed traces.
(module: OTLP Ingest) You can send OpenTelemetry metric data in OTLP format to Dynatrace via an API available on Dynatrace ActiveGate.
(module: Log Monitoring) You can send OpenTelemetry log data in OTLP format to Dynatrace via an API available on Dynatrace ActiveGate.
(module: Beacon forwarder) Dynatrace infrastructure can be used as the default beacon endpoint for the agentless monitoring of your applications. Auto-injected applications send the beacon back to the customer's web server, bypassing the need for a third-party domain. However, when required, such applications can also use the Dynatrace infrastructure as an endpoint for RUM monitoring signals.