Clouds app

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  • App
  • 4-min read

The new cloud experience is optimized for Cloud (Platform) Operation teams and Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) and focuses on health, troubleshooting, and performance optimization use cases of (multi-)cloud environments.

The centerpiece of this experience is Clouds Clouds.

  • Onboard your cloud accounts and start to analyze your full cloud inventory within minutes.
  • Analyze metrics, events, logs, traces, metadata and topology from virtual machines, serverless functions, databases, queues, storage, networking, and many more—in one view.
  • Use health alerts to ensure optimal health and performance. Reduce troubleshooting and remediation time with AI-powered alerting.
  • Leverage your (existing) cloud tags to route notifications, define ownership, or allocate costs.
  • Take advantage of ready-made dashboards to save time and get instant insights.

The underlying observability data is all powered by Grail, which supports flexible analytics through the Dynatrace Query Language in Notebooks Notebooks, Dashboards Dashboards, and Workflows Workflows.

Get a comprehensive view of your multi-cloud environments and see your full cloud inventoryDetails of problems associated with selected cloud resources are easy to analyzeSee full configuration details of cloud servicesGet started immediately with ready-made dashboards. Customize them according to your needs.Use ready-made health alerts and warning signals and custom alert templates to assess health of your cloud services.Easily and seamlessly set up a new AWS connection. New Cloud Connections simplifies the onboarding experience for customers.You can still use Explorer Classic for classic cloud connections
1 of 7Get a comprehensive view of your multi-cloud environments and see your full cloud inventory

Prerequisites

Clouds Clouds is automatically installed as a core app managed by Dynatrace.

Connections

See concepts for the comparison between classic and new cloud connections.

Permissions

The following table describes the required permissions.

Permission
Description
settings:objects:read
Read settings of ownership (settings:schemaIds = builtin:ownership.config) - required by Ownership tab in details panel.
unified-analysis:screen-definition:read
Read details screen config. Necessary for displaying details panel.
davis:analyzers:execute
Execute Davis analyzers. Necessary for presenting problems details in Problems tab in details panel.
hub:catalog:read
Read Hub catalog.
app-settings:objects:read
Read app settings objects. Required for onboarding logs in context.
app-settings:objects:write
Write app settings objects.
slo:slos:read
Read for SLOs tab.
state:user-app-states:read
Read user app state. Necessary for presenting events in Events tab in details panel.
state:user-app-states:write
Storing per-user app state.
document:documents:read
Read documents. Required by filter presets feature. Required for ready-made dashboards (Overview).

Get started

Clouds Clouds has an integrated onboarding flow that guides you through all the required steps to get started. The exact steps you need to take depend on your cloud provider and the type of cloud connection (new or classic).

Use the following guide to set up and configure a new AWS cloud connection in Dynatrace.

01Create a new AWS connection
  • How-to guide
  • Learn how to create a new AWS connection in the Clouds app.

Overview (New connections)

The Overview New tab is the landing page, where you can start discovering Clouds Clouds, get data into Dynatrace, and see a summary of the health state of your AWS and/or Azure services based on new cloud connections at a glance. On that page, you can:

  • Select the AWS services or Azure services tile, choose a specific service category, or select the counter in the upper-right corner of the tile to access the Explorer New tab with a list of selected services.

  • Review the health state of cloud services, depending on your alert setup. To list the unhealthy services in Explorer New, select the red counter (if any) in the upper-right corner of the tile.

  • Open ready-made dashboards for the most popular services (for example, AWS Lambda) or select Browse all dashboards to list all ready-made dashboards for AWS and/or Azure.

    Clouds app | Overview

Explorer (New connections)

Use the Explorer New tab to analyze your AWS cloud services and environments. You can explore, filter, and analyze data using various features in Clouds Clouds.

  • In the sidebar on the left, you can select a specific service category (such as Containers or Functions) or analyze all services. In addition, you can quickly filter by predefined attributes that are relevant for the selected category. Select any attribute in the facets sidebar and select Update to get results. The filter field is updated with your selection.

  • Alternatively, select the filter field at the top to view suggestions and enter filtering options. Add more statements to narrow down the results. Criteria of the same type are grouped by OR logic. Criteria of different types are grouped by AND logic. You can filter services using tags, alert status, and attributes like name or region. This helps you focus on specific subsets of services based on your criteria.

    For more details on the filter field syntax, see Filter field.

  • You can explore data in the table using the available perspectives:

    • Health
    • Utilization (for compute services)
    • Metadata
    • To tailor the results details that you see in the table, select Column settings and select the columns you want to display.

    Clouds app | Explorer - filtering - utilization

  • Select a specific cloud service in the table to analyze all data in context: metrics, logs, events, metadata, configuration, and topology.

    Select Dashboards Go to dashboard to navigate to the respective ready-made dashboard while maintaining the selected timeframe and filters.

    Clouds app | Explorer - details view

Alerting (New connections)

Clouds Clouds provides ready-made health alerts and warning signals for your cloud services, as well as alert templates for setting up additional custom alerts for popular AWS services.

Health alerts and warning signals

Health alerts and warning signals are provided and maintained out of the box by Dynatrace.

  • A health alert creates a Dynatrace problem that triggers root-cause analysis in Dynatrace.

  • A warning is created for a resource when the observation is not critical and shouldn't raise a problem.

    Health alerts and warning signals are both surfaced in Clouds Clouds.

You can easily adopt ready-made health alerts and warning signals for your AWS accounts either upon your AWS connection onboarding or in Settings Settings.

If you want to create new or update ready-made health alerts and warning signals, go to Settings Settings > Analyze and alert > Alerts > Cloud services, where you can create, update, and enable/disable alerts for your connections.

  • Alert scope
    • Actor (service user): Provide a Dynatrace service user on whose behalf the alert evaluation (and thus queries) are executed. The service user requires at least the following permissions:
      • storage:metrics:read
      • storage:buckets:read
      • davis:analyzers:execute
    • Alert scope (region): Allows you to filter alert evaluations only for specific regions. For example, filter for us-east-1 to get alerts and warnings only for cloud services hosted in that region.
    • Alert conditions
    • Depending on the detection model of the configured alert, you can customize different parameters such as threshold and number of signal fluctuations.
Settings | Ready-made alertsSettings | Health alert details
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Alert templates

Dynatrace provides predefined alert templates to allow for additional custom alerts on popular cloud services. These alert templates are complementary to ready-made health alerts and warning signals.

You can easily create new custom alerts directly in Clouds Clouds by selecting a template and New Alert.

Next, you can either customize the alert in the Anomaly Detection wizard or create the alert with one click.

Clouds app | Custom alert templates

You can find all custom alerts and more information around capabilities and limits in Anomaly Detection - new Anomaly Detection.

Explorer (Classic connections)

The Explorer (Classic connections) tab surfaces data coming from classic cloud connections and allows for the analysis of cloud services across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

If you've already used Dynatrace for cloud platform monitoring, the classic connections and Explorer (Classic connections) continue to provide the same value.

Clouds app | Explorer (Classic connections)

Concepts

New cloud connections vs classic cloud connections

Clouds Clouds provides a comprehensive view of your (multi-)cloud environments, enabling you to optimize the health, performance, and resource utilization of your cloud services.

Currently, Clouds Clouds supports two types of cloud connections:

New cloud connections (AWS, Preview for Azure)

The newest cloud platform connections by Dynatrace provide an easier, more flexible, and more powerful way to connect AWS and Azure cloud accounts with Dynatrace. Support for GCP will follow soon.

All data is natively stored in Grail and surfaced on the Overview New and Explorer New tabs within Clouds Clouds.

Classic connections

The classic cloud connections are available for AWS, Azure, and GCP within the previous (AWS Classic, Azure Classic, GCP Classic) and latest Dynatrace.

Classic connections are surfaced on the Explorer (Classic connection) tab in Clouds Clouds and have no specific licensing requirements.

The Explorer New and Overview New tabs only operate upon data originating from new AWS cloud connections.

Azure and GCP will follow in the future.

Perspectives: Health, Utilization, and Metadata (New connections)

Each perspective on monitoring your cloud services can be tailored to your needs by showing or hiding columns in the table.

  • Health—provides health-related information
  • Utilization (available for compute services)—provides perspective focuses on operational efficiency
  • Metadata—surfaces additional information, such as cloud tags

Health and custom alerts

In the Health perspective, you can see each cloud service's health and custom alerts. When you hover over a health or custom alert badge, you see the problems and further analysis options.

  • Select View event to directly navigate to the details, such as relevant metrics for the respective problem.
  • Select Investigate problem to enter Problem mode.

Problem mode enables precise investigation and analysis of any health-related issues.

  • This mode highlights the most relevant metrics associated with the alert and narrows down the timeframe to the start and end times of the selected problem.
  • Additionally, it offers quick access to the underlying problem, allowing you to efficiently diagnose and resolve issues.
  • You can use Davis Intelligence to get additional insights about the problem and potential remediation steps.

Problem mode is always active when you navigate from a specific problem in Problems app - new Problems to Clouds Clouds.

Clouds Clouds operates in Problem mode whenever a problem is highlighted next to the filter bar at the top of the app.

Ready-made dashboards (New connections)

You have access to the following ready-made dashboards for the new AWS Cloud Platform Monitoring:

  • AWS Overview
  • AWS API (API Gateway and REST APIs)
  • AWS Bedrock
  • AWS Dynamo DB
  • AWS EC2 (EC2, EBS, AutoScaling)
  • AWS ECS (including ECS Container Insights)
  • AWS Edge Networking (Route 53, CloudFront)
  • AWS EFS
  • AWS ElastiCache (Redis, Memcached)
  • AWS ELB (Application, Classic, Network Load Balancing)
  • AWS EventBridge
  • AWS Foundation Networking (NAT Gateway, PrivateLink)
  • AWS Health Events
  • AWS Lambda
  • AWS MSK (Kafka)
  • AWS RDS (including Aurora)
  • AWS S3
  • AWS SNS
  • AWS SQS

The ready-made dashboards can be accessed through:

  • Dashboards Dashboards

    Open Dashboards Dashboards, select Ready-made dashboards in the left menu, and search for aws.

  • Clouds Clouds

    • Open Clouds Clouds and select the Overview New tab. You can then either select one of the more popular dashboards directly (for example, AWS Lambda) or select Browse all dashboards.
    • Clouds Clouds allows you to navigate from a specific service to the respective dashboard in context ( Dashboards Go to dashboard). The selected timeframe, segment, and applied filters will be carried over from Clouds Clouds to the dashboard.

Clouds app | Dashboard navigation

Segments (New connections)

Segments allow you to logically structure and conveniently filter observability data across apps on the Dynatrace platform. Segments are available within the new Explorer New tab and can be defined easily for new cloud connections, since all data (including Smartscape nodes) is stored in Grail.

For a step-by-step guide on how to define segments for Smartscape nodes, see Filter Smartscape nodes with segments. You can use any primary Grail field (and, in the future, also tags) to conveniently define simple segments across All data:

Example segment definition by AWS Account ID:

Segment - AWS account

In Clouds Clouds (or any other app that supports segments), you can then choose the segment AWS account and select one or more awsAccountIDs for filtering.

Use cases

  • Understand your (multi-)cloud architectures and dependencies
  • Assess health of your cloud services
  • Troubleshoot problems in Clouds Clouds
  • Analyze performance and resource utilization

FAQ

What if I already have existing cloud connections?

The existing, classic cloud connections stay as they are and are not automatically upgraded or removed.

To benefit from the new AWS Cloud Platform Monitoring, you need to create a new cloud connection for your AWS accounts.

The same AWS Account for the classic and new cloud connections

We do not recommend setting up the classic and new cloud connections for the same AWS account. For a heterogeneous set of AWS accounts, classic and new cloud connections can co-exist.

How can I join the Azure Preview?

You can find more information and join the Cloud Platform Monitoring for Azure Preview through our Preview program page.

Hub

Explore in Dynatrace Hub

Onboard your new multicloud environments and monitor their resources.

Related tags
CloudsCloudsInfrastructure Observability