This course introduces Dynatrace for monitoring infrastructure, applications, and digital experiences. Participants learn to navigate the platform, understand how monitoring data is collected, investigate performance issues, and create useful dashboards. The course covers observability fundamentals, OneAgent, service dependencies, logs, introductory Dynatrace Query Language (DQL), and problem investigation. A capstone brings these skills together through a sample application troubleshooting scenario.

 

Duration 3 Days – 21 hrs.

 

Objectives

• Explain observability fundamentals and the roles of metrics, logs, and traces.
• Navigate Dynatrace and locate relevant monitoring information.
• Describe the roles of OneAgent, ActiveGate, and Grail.
• Deploy OneAgent in a prepared training environment and verify data collection.
• Interpret infrastructure and application performance indicators.
• Explore service dependencies and distributed traces.
• Search logs and write basic DQL queries.
• Create dashboards and notebooks to communicate operational findings.
• Interpret detected problems and configure basic alerting.
• Investigate a sample performance issue using correlated monitoring data.

 

Target Audience 

• IT operations and application support personnel.
• System administrators and infrastructure engineers.
• Junior DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers.
• Developers who support application performance and reliability.
• Monitoring and observability team members.
• Technical professionals beginning to use Dynatrace.

 

Prerequisites

• IT operations and application support personnel.
• System administrators and infrastructure engineers.
• Junior DevOps engineers and site reliability engineers.
• Developers who support application performance and reliability.
• Monitoring and observability team members.
• Technical professionals beginning to use Dynatrace.

Course Outline 

Day 1: Observability Foundations and Platform Setup

Module 1: Introduction to Observability and Dynatrace

• Monitoring and observability fundamentals.
• Metrics, logs, traces, and events.
• Common application and infrastructure monitoring use cases.
• Overview of Dynatrace capabilities.
• Understanding response time, throughput, error rate, and availability.

 Module 2: Dynatrace Components and Navigation

• Overview of OneAgent, ActiveGate, and telemetry ingestion.
• Introduction to Grail and monitoring data.
• Navigating Dynatrace apps and monitoring views.
• Selecting time ranges and applying filters.
• Understanding monitored entities and their relationships.
• Basic access and permissions concepts.

Module 3: Getting Started with OneAgent

• Supported deployment options and installation prerequisites.
• Installing OneAgent on a prepared training host.
• Understanding monitoring modes.
• Verifying connectivity and incoming monitoring data.
• Automatic discovery of hosts, processes, and services.
• Basic troubleshooting of missing monitoring data.

Module 4: Infrastructure Monitoring Essentials

• Exploring host health and resource utilization.
• Interpreting CPU, memory, disk, and network indicators.
• Understanding processes and process groups.
• Recognizing resource constraints and unusual behavior.
• Introduction to tags and entity organization.

 

Day 2: Application Performance and Data Exploration

Module 5: Application and Service Monitoring

• Understanding applications, services, and dependencies.
• Exploring service response times, throughput, and failures.
• Identifying slow requests and affected services.
• Introduction to distributed traces and request analysis.
• Recognizing database calls and downstream dependencies.

Module 6: Log Exploration and Basic DQL

• Finding and filtering relevant logs.
• Understanding log timestamps, severity, and attributes.
• Introduction to DQL query structure.
• Using basic commands such as fetch, filter, fields, sort, and limit.
• Producing simple summaries with summarize.
• Connecting log findings with application performance symptoms.

Module 7: Dashboards and Notebooks

• Exploring existing dashboards.
• Creating a basic operational dashboard.
• Selecting suitable charts and tables.
• Adding query-based visualizations.
• Applying time ranges and filters.
• Using notebooks to organize queries and investigation notes.
• Sharing monitoring insights with appropriate access.

 

Day 3: Problem Investigation and Operational Use

Module 8: Problems, Anomaly Detection, and Notifications

• Distinguishing events, anomalies, and problems.
• Introduction to automated baselines and anomaly detection.
• Understanding AI-assisted problem correlation and root cause findings.
• Reviewing affected entities, impact, and problem timelines.
• Introduction to alert configuration and notification routing.
• Recognizing common causes of unnecessary alerts.

Module 9: Digital Experience Monitoring Essentials

• Purpose and scope of real user monitoring.
• Understanding user actions, sessions, and frontend errors.
• Purpose and scope of synthetic monitoring.
• Introduction to browser monitors and HTTP monitors.
• Interpreting availability and response-time results.
• Relating user experience issues to backend performance.

Module 10: A Practical Troubleshooting Workflow

• Defining the reported symptom and investigation time range.
• Identifying affected applications, services, and infrastructure.
• Reviewing dependencies, traces, logs, and resource indicators.
• Distinguishing observed symptoms from potential causes.
• Documenting evidence and recommended follow-up actions.

 Module 11: Capstone — Investigating a Sample Application Issue

• Review the health of a monitored sample application.
• Investigate a prepared slowdown or error scenario.
• Identify affected services and relevant dependencies.
• Explore supporting traces, logs, and infrastructure metrics.
• Create a dashboard summarizing application health.
• Prepare an incident summary with findings and proposed next steps.