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DPOD and Dynatrace

IBM DataPower Operations Dashboard Documentation

DPOD and Dynatrace

Owned by Amit Munwes
Oct 07, 2024
3 min read

Many customers use DPOD and Dynatrace as complementary products:

  • Dynatrace is used as the enterprise full-stack observability solution, delivering analytics and automation for unified observability and security across numerous products and technologies (including DataPower).

  • DPOD is used to debug, troubleshoot and fix DataPower transactional and configuration issues, to assist in API/service development/testing and adoption, to monitor the health of the DataPower gateways and to manage them.

Key Differences

The key differences between DPOD and Dynatrace are:

  1. DPOD is tailored for DataPower and is built on DataPower deep knowledge, making it IBM’s premier tool for monitoring and management of DataPower gateways.

  2. DPOD uses many methods and sources of information to collect information from DataPower.

  3. DPOD provides debug-level transactional data and transaction logs for debugging, troubleshooting and fixing DataPower transactional issues.

  4. DPOD monitors the configuration of the DataPower gateways (failed objects, certificate expiry, etc.).

  5. DPOD includes DataPower configuration management features (backups, firmware upgrades, import services, etc.).

  6. DPOD accelerates the development/testing and adoption of APIs/services, by providing great value for DataPower experts and for users with zero DataPower expertise in prod and non-prod, based on roles and permissions.

  7. DPOD provides everything out-of-the-box (dashboards, error analysis, alerts, etc.) with almost zero maintenance and configuration efforts.

Detailed Comparison Table

 

DPOD

Dynatrace

 

DPOD

Dynatrace

Transactional Data

  • Invocation details (gateway, domain, API/service, URL, consumer, etc.).

Only available for API Gateways (not for DataPower services such as MPGW)

  • Error details and analysis, including early failing transactions (e.g.: TLS failures).

Basic error details (such as HTTP response code).

  • Transaction logs, including custom logs emitted by developers.

  • Detailed view of each step in the transaction, including latency analysis.

  • Payloads (requests/responses) and headers including back-end invocations.

  • Debug-level data (variable values, inputs/outputs, matched conditions, etc.).

DataPower Health Monitoring

  • Resources utilization (CPU, memory, load, file systems, etc.).

  • Physical gateway health (fan, temperature, voltage, etc.).

  • System events (e.g.: battery failure or disk failure).

  • Service-level resources.

DataPower Configuration Monitoring

  • MQ connection pool utilization.

  • Failed configuration objects (e.g.: GatewayPeering objects that are down).

Only for a few object types.

  • Certificate expiry messages (from DataPower Certificate Monitor).

  • Service configuration including changes over time.

  • Restart information (based on DataPower audit logs).

DataPower Device and Configuration Management

  • Scheduled DataPower backups.

  • DataPower Firmware upgrades.

  • Domain configuration synchronization.

  • DataPower Appliance migration.

  • Update WSDLs for DataPower Web Service Proxies.

  • Start and stop DataPower services.

  • Import DataPower services.

Reports and Alerts

  • Ready-to-use reports (errors, latency, resources, etc.).

Only a few built-in reports.

  • Ready-to-use alerts (certificates expiry, latency, errors, failed objects, etc.).

Only a few built-in events, mainly about resource utilization.

Coverage

  • Coverage of many products and technologies.

Tailored for DataPower/API gateways only.

  • Transaction correlation across many products.

Correlates across APIs/services/gateways only.

User Roles and Expertise

  • Pre-defined roles and permissions for different types of users.

  • Designed for DataPower experts and for users with zero DataPower expertise.

  • Provides everything out-of-the-box (dashboards, error analysis, alerts, etc.).

Onboarding and Maintenance

  • Quick installation

Takes just a couple of hours.

Usually the infrastructure exists, adding the DataPower gateways should be easy.

  • Almost zero maintenance and configuration efforts.

  • High customization level (e.g.: create new visualizations).

Moderate customization level (e.g.: use existing visualizations only).

Sources of Information

  • DataPower REST management interface

  • DataPower log targets

  • DataPower XML management interface

  • DataPower Web Services Management Agent

  • API-Connect Analytics Offload

  • DataPower Probes

  • OpenTelemtry

 

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