Set up Dynatrace Managed for AWS monitoring

• Updated on Jun 27, 2022

You can integrate Dynatrace with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for intelligent monitoring of services running in the Amazon Cloud. AWS integration helps you stay on top of the dynamics of your data center in the cloud.

Overview

Follow these basic steps to integrate Dynatrace Managed with Amazon Web Services (AWS):

AWS costs

Dynatrace makes Amazon API requests every five minutes. In addition to CloudWatch API calls, Dynatrace makes API calls to the monitored AWS services to learn about their instances, tags, etc. The list of called services and actions is available below in the Create the monitoring policy section.

Here's a rough estimate of AWS monitoring costs:

AWS monitoring policy

The AWS monitoring policy defines the minimal scope of permissions you need to give to Dynatrace to monitor the services running in your AWS account. Create it once and use it any time when enabling Dynatrace access to your AWS account. If you don't want to add permissions to all services, and just select permissions for certain services, consult the table below. The table contains a set of permissions that are required for All AWS cloud services and, for each cloud service, a list of optional permissions specific to that service.

Complete list of permissions for cloud services

Access method

To get the information required for comprehensive AWS cloud-computing monitoring, Dynatrace needs to identify all the virtualized infrastructure components in your AWS environment and collect performance metrics related to those components. We use this information to understand the context of your applications, services, and hosts. For this to happen, you need to authorize Dynatrace to access your Amazon metrics.

Make sure that your Environment ActiveGate or Managed Cluster has a working connection to AWS. Configure your proxy for Managed or ActiveGate, or allow access to *.amazonaws.com in your firewall settings.

Role-based access with Environment ActiveGate or Dynatrace Managed Server

The instructions below apply whether or not the account hosting your ActiveGate is the same as your monitored account.

In a typical setup, you need to create two CloudFormation stacks using CloudFormation templates:

Prerequisites for role-based access, with Environment ActiveGate or Dynatrace Managed Server

To enable access to your Amazon account using role-based access, follow the steps below.

Create a role for ActiveGate on the account that hosts ActiveGate

Create a monitoring role for Dynatrace on your monitored account

Modify ActiveGate configuration

Create a role for ActiveGate on the account that hosts ActiveGate

aws cloudformation create-stack \
--capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM \
--stack-name <stack_name> \
--template-body <file:///home/user/template_file.yaml> \
--parameters ParameterKey=ActiveGateRoleName,ParameterValue=<role_name> ParameterKey=AssumePolicyName,ParameterValue=<policy_name> ParameterKey=MonitoringRoleName,ParameterValue=<monitoring_role_name> ParameterKey=MonitoredAccountID,ParameterValue=<monitored_account_id>

Create a monitoring role for Dynatrace on your monitored account

After the Dynatrace_ActiveGate_role is created on the account hosting the ActiveGate, create a role for the account to be monitored.

Modify ActiveGate configuration

Connect your Amazon account

Once you've granted AWS access to Dynatrace, it's time to connect Dynatrace to your Amazon AWS account.

Select your AWS partition

If your AWS account is on a different partition than the default aws partition, you can select it and Dynatrace will connect to it instead.

To change your AWS partition

Adjust monitoring to your needs

You can alter the scope and content of your monitoring depending on your preferences by using tags and listing services needed.

Limit monitored resources using tags

We recommend that you limit the scope of your AWS monitoring and reduce the number API calls to Amazon. You can use tagging to limit the AWS resources (AWS service instances) that are monitored by Dynatrace.

Set up metric events for alerting

To configure metric events for alerting, follow this guide.

Choose Cloud services to be monitored

Once your credentials are saved, you can decide which services will be monitored. To select your preferred services