Process Group Availability Monitoring

Process Group Availability Monitoring

Dynatrace continuously monitors the availability of process groups to ensure the operational health of your critical applications. You can configure Dynatrace to proactively alert you if any process or a defined number of processes within a specific process group goes offline or crashes.

To access these settings:

1. Go to Hosts or Hosts Classic.
2. Select the host of interest.
3. Scroll down and select Consuming processes.
4. From the Process list, select the specific process group (or individual process).
5. From the browse menu (…), select Settings.
6. Select Availability monitoring.

Settings for Process Group Availability Monitoring

Alerting is disabled by default. To enable availability monitoring and alerting for a process group, you must first toggle on “Enable process group availability monitoring.”

Once enabled, you have two primary options for how Dynatrace should open a new problem for availability issues:

Option 1: “if any process becomes unavailable”

Description: This setting triggers an availability event and opens a new problem if any single process instance within the selected process group shuts down or crashes. This provides immediate notification for any loss of a process within the group, regardless of how many other instances are still running.

Note:

• Granularity: This option provides the most granular level of availability alerting, notifying you of even a single process failure.
• Use Case: Ideal for critical process groups where the loss of even one instance is considered a significant issue requiring immediate attention.
• Manual Closure: If a process is intentionally shut down or retired while this setting is active, you’ll need to manually close the problem in Dynatrace.
• Tags: This option uses the tags on the process group instance for alerting, as it focuses on the individual instances within the group.

Option 2: “if minimum threshold is not met”

Description: This setting is designed for clustered process groups. It triggers an availability event and opens a new problem when the user-defined minimum number of running process instances within the selected process group is not met. Dynatrace treats the group as a cluster and only alerts if the number of active process instances drops below your specified threshold.

Note:

• Threshold-Based: This allows you to define a specific tolerance for process failures within a cluster before an alert is raised.
• Use Case: Best suited for highly available, load-balanced process groups where a certain number of instances can fail without immediately impacting service, but dropping below a critical minimum would affect performance or availability.
• Configuration: Requires entering a numerical value in the “Open a new problem if the number of active process instances in the group is fewer than:” field (e.g., 2 as shown in the example screenshot).
• Manual Closure: Similar to the first option, if a process is intentionally shutdown or retired and its absence causes the threshold to be breached, you’ll need to manually close the problem.
• Tags: This option uses the tags on the process group itself for alerting, as it evaluates the overall availability of the group as a cluster.