HCL Workload Automation Observability for Dynatrace

We’ve already discussed the importance of observability in digital business applications and how it’s supplanted the concept of monitoring — enabling end-to-end visibility into business applications, systems, APIs, microservices, networks, infrastructure and more. To learn more about that, dig into this piece on HCL Workload Automation Observability for Splunk.

Meanwhile, let’s focus in this post on why we chose Dynatrace as an additional integration, and then look at how this integration works.

Gartner has named Dynatrace as a Leader in the 2022 Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Dynatrace has much more to offer than a simple APM solution — in fact, it can capture all sides of an application’s observability simultaneously. Observability from the Dynatrace platform extends beyond metrics, logs and traces to include user experience data, runtime security data, and data from the latest open-source standards, such as OpenTelemetry. Dynatrace (SaaS and Managed) is able to ingest data from applications like HCL Workload Automation (HWA). That data can then be autodetected and ingested to the database—which, in turn, converts it to individual events and metrics, ready to be filtered and displayed in dashboards.

HWA Observability Dashboard for Dynatrace is a solution that incorporates HWA integration with Dynatrace, including predefined dashboards that can be deployed on Dynatrace. In these dashboards, you can view at a glance the full status of your workloads for the engine you have configured. The overview dashboard provides a single, consolidated view for monitoring activities, infrastructure, jobs, job streams, status of workstations, and so on. You can then drill down in each individual dashboard for more complete data insights.

Dashboard: Jobs and Job Streams Dashboard

Description: The Jobs and Job Streams dashboard displays status and insights for HWA jobs, critical jobs, and job streams.

Input Source: HWA deployment events sidecar container and HWA server logs

Dashboard: KPIs and Workstations Dashboard

Description: The KPIs and Workstations dashboard displays the HWA KPI information and enables drilldown to see the time series data in visual representation for defined KPIs.

Input Source: API exposed by HWA Server

Dashboard: Auditing Dashboard

Description: The Auditing Dashboard displays workstation and audit information, such as activities performed by users.

Input Source: HWA sidecar containers; DB auditing and plan auditing

Dashboard: Infrastructure Dashboard

Description: The Infrastructure Dashboard displays an overview of infrastructure details for HWA deployed in a Kubernetes environment.

Input Source: Infrastructure logs exposed by Kubernetes cluster where HWA is deployed

Conclusion

Although there are many observability tools available in the market, HWA is integrating with top tools like Dynatrace. By leveraging Dynatrace’s predefined dashboard capability, this integration makes it easy to visualize KPIs, search and filter data among large volumes of logs, and visualize them in dashboards. Check out this demo of the HWA Observability Dashboard for Dynatrace to learn more as you prepare an HWA observability strategy that cuts through all the blind spots and reduces your mean time to issue resolution. Additional integrations with other top observability tools will be coming in the future, too — so stay tuned!