DX Operational Observability

For DX Operational Observability (DX O2), the catalyst for the Custom Attributes capability emerged from a requirement articulated by a prominent European bank. Facing increasingly complex IT infrastructures and a growing array of applications, the bank sought a deeper, more nuanced understanding of their operational landscape. They needed to enrich monitoring data with business context for granular insights across various organizational silos. Specifically, they aimed to dissect usage patterns based on multiple dimensions such as individual departments, the diverse array of hosting environments (on-premises, cloud, hybrid cloud), and the distinct phases of the software development lifecycle (dev, test, production).

Customizing Attributes

DX Operational Observability includes a rich set of standard, out-of-the-box attributes that are predefined to provide users with a foundational framework to manage data. Additionally, DX O2 allows you to unlock additional value from attributes and tailor them to your specific needs and expand the functionality of entities for monitoring components. With this customization, you can store additional metadata, regulate behavior, and establish relationships. While offering this flexibility, customizing attributes provides a systematic approach for how data is presented and analyzed within DX O2. 

In this blog, I will provide guidelines for customizing attributes, adding them to your applications and displaying attribute data within DX Dashboards. For detailed instructions, I’ve highlighted resources to  help you enrich entities with information specific to your organization such as business unit detail and application hosting type such as on-premises, cloud or hybrid cloud. Adopting these principles and following a few fundamental steps will help you deliver personalised dashboards for more precise reporting on applications with helpful business unit- and hosting environment context 

Core Principles

Adhere to the following principles to establish and utilize the attributes across the organisation. 

1. Plan: Plan attributes to ensure they fulfill the requirements of your application or system. Do this early; not ad hoc and not after-the-fact!

2. Be Consistent: Define and commit to a naming convention. 

3. Capture Your Thinking - Communicate: Clarify and ideally document attribute usage across various entities.

As simple as these are, consistently following these principles requires organizational discipline. When exceptions to naming conventions are introduced, for example, teams create work for themselves and others as they hunt for the information they need. 

Filtering and Searching

The larger, more dynamic your environments, the more teams will rely on accurate and precise filtering and searching. By following the principles above, users across your organization will be able to quickly locate entities based on attribute values.

Potential Use Cases of Custom Attributes

To take advantage of the Custom Attribute capability, refer to the following resources to accomplish custom attribute decorations in DX 02:

• Infrastructure Agent: For details on including custom attribute decoration, please refer to the documentation available here: Infrastructure Agent. 

• UMA Attribute Decoration: To configure Universal Monitoring Agent (UMA) attribute decoration, refer to documentation here: UMA Attribute Decoration.

• Java Agent: Instructions for Java Agent custom attribute decoration can be found in the documentation here: Java Agent.

• Dotnet Agent: Access configuration details of the Dotnet Agent, specifically custom attribute decorations for .NET and .NET Core Agents at this link: Dotnet Agent.

The following illustrates using attribute decoration within a DX Dashboard. You can create dashboards that display your environment, department, and data center location. If we closely observe we can determine some of the applications hasn't decorated by application the location hence we have lesser agents compared to agents connected. These attributes will help not only knowing the details but also ensure the best practices are followed or any application missing best practices.

Alarm Enrichment Can Leverage Custom Attributes

Attributes can be used to enrich alarms and provide helpful context and detail to alarms. Below is an example which illustrates how to incorporate custom attributes into enrichment rules. 

Here, the inventory contains a range of both standard and custom attributes. These custom attributes present helpful context for application teams to understand issues and prfioritize work. 

Custom attributes provide enormous value –helping teams find the information they need more quickly to address issues when they arise and pre-empt issues by observing more precise and context-rich monitoring information. To unlock this value, follow the core principles above, consider and design for business requirements, and incorporate the attribute data in your DX Dashboards,Alarm enrichment