Article by Lucas H. · Mar 25, 2020 at 09:47 PM · edited · Nov 03, 2020 at 05:42 PM

BizOps Configurator - Comments and News

At Perform this year, John and I introduced the BizOps Configurator as a simple tool to transform and manage sets of curated dashboard templates. Since then we've had over a 150 monthly users using the tool to deploy out hundreds of customized dashboards. John and I have already received a lot of great feedback directly, but I thought it made sense to start a dedicated thread to post news on the Configurator and collect feedback.

If you haven't tried it yet, you can access the Configurator here: https://dynatrace.github.io/BizOpsConfigurator

Recent enhancements (Q4 - )

Enhancements for Powerup-enabled dashboards
Workflow Builder enhancements
Fix edit for deployed dashboard packs

Past enhancements (Perform - Q3):

Configurator moved to Dynatrace company org
- New URL: https://dynatrace.github.io/BizOpsConfigurator
Dashboard Cleanup:
- List dashboards by owner
- Bulk Download JSONs
- Bulk Publish/Unpublish
- Bulk Delete
New templates:
- Dashboard Basics - getting started dashboards for new Dynatrace users
- Citrix - overviews for the Dynatrace Citrix Extension (updated April)
- SAP - overviews for the Dynatrace SAP Extension (updated April)
- Remote Employee - overviews for the sudden shift to WFH due to COVID-19
- Template transformations moved to ${MyString} syntax
UI Enhancements:
- Have browser treat tokens like passwords
- Repo config screen (Gear Icon) to allow addition or testing of personal dashboard repos
- Loaded dashboard templates screen (Monitor Icon) to display the heirarchy and JSON of loaded templates
Offline Mode (see #19 here):
- Download entire JSON pack outside your airgapped environment
- Use whatever approved process you have to bring the JSON file in
- Load JSON pack inside your airgapped environment
Better error handling:
- User friendly error screen
- Better notifications if issues arrise
- Better handling of Github API ratelimiting
- Caching of dashboard XHRs
First release of "Persona" based workflow and Workflow Builder
- Deploy dashboard packs targetted for specific audiences and usecases
- Build workflow to customize dashboard pack with no code
New templates:
- Now up to 12 templates in New Flow, everything from User Journeys to K8s Overviews
- Old Flow will be deprecated soon, Dashboard pack owners should switch over to New Flow
Deep linking:
- Love a dashboard pack? Grab the URL from your browser and send to a friend or post on social
Caching:
- Implemented caching with IndexedDB to reduce downloads and Github API ratelimiting
Workflow Builder:
- Easily create Configurator workflows to get input from API / user and transform your dashboard packs
- Now with 10 different types of widgets or user interactions

Planned ideas backlog:

Migrate KeyUserAction and UserSessionProperty lookups to ConfigAPI from USQL query, once API endpoint is available
Better visualization for which dashboards were just deployed
Please suggest more on GitHub!

Looking for example dashboards / dashboard packs:

Mobile App focused
More Powerup enabled dashboards

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Laima V. ♦♦ · Mar 26, 2020 at 11:56 AM 1

Hi @Lucas H. Thanks a lot for this update! It is very valuable to see in one place recent enhancements and planned ideas. Your article is really appreciated :-)

Lucas H. · Apr 05, 2020 at 05:57 PM 3

Here's some screenshots of the new Dashboard Cleanup feature:

4400 Dashboards! Somebody's been busy... 2200 people in this environment have been busy. There's also over 200 of them that have been Published out to all users. We need a way to clean all that up! Luckily we can already do that with the Dynatrace Config API! Now the Configurator has an extra button to do that cleanup, so you don't have to touch API Explorer, PostMan, or Python.

Click! Select a bunch, and click!

Hope you find it useful!

dashboard-cleanup.png (1.0 MiB)

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screen-shot-2020-04-05-at-123000-pm.png (17.7 KiB)

Jason W. · Apr 29, 2020 at 08:01 PM 1

HI Lucas,

Nice work, this has been helpful already. One thing that I noticed, and also leads me to a couple enhancements, is when deploying a Journey and using Overview Template "UserJourney (w/o KPI)" - I get to the upload screen, click upload and it doesn't do anything (I see "Loading" for a second then returns to the same screen without actually uploading, or changing any text on the screen). As a comparison, "LiteUserJourney (w/o KPI)" works fine.

Couple ideas:

Would it make sense to skip the KPI screen on the "(w/o KPI)" templates? that may be confusing.

Also, when choosing "(w/ KPI)" templates, if you don't have any KPIs defined, it should tell you, rather than defaulting to n/a and allowing you to continue (which results with a dashboard that shows USQL errors). This is the same idea when selecting the User Actions for the funnel. If there are no Key UAs defined, make it obvious.

Thanks for all your work on this!

Jason

Lucas H. Jason W. · May 05, 2020 at 04:44 PM 1

Hi Jason,

Good suggestions! The hang you describe was a bug that's been fixed. We now also skip the KPI screen if a (w/o) template is picked. And you get a popup if you use a (w/) template and don't have any defined. I also created similar popup if you don't have any KUAs / Goals.

Keep the feedback coming!

-Lucas

Kenneth G. · May 06, 2020 at 02:54 PM 1

Hi, our team are loving these dashboards.

Two dashboards don't appear to be working (I tried Twice)

1.) .net Monitoring

2.) Tomcat Monitoring

Also, where can we download individual JSON dashboards? I reviewed https://github.com/TechShady/Dynatrace-DashboardV5 and didn't see .net and tomcat dashboards there.

Thanks again!

Dave M. Kenneth G. · May 06, 2020 at 05:50 PM 1

Hi Kenneth,

I originally created the .NET and Tomcat dashboards. Unfortunately, they became broken recently due to some breaking changes introduced while making the dashboards configuration API GA.

Rather than simply recreating them, I elected to take a totally different tack and write a dashboard generator that will basically read our entire custom metrics list and allow for generating the dashboards for each category of metric from a spreadsheet (the spreadsheet is generated and then you can modify it to choose the tile types you want, etc.).

I plan to soon have the generator coded enough to regenerate all the dashboards I had previously posted on Github and at that time will be replacing those templates: https://github.com/Dynatrace-Dave-Mauney/DashboardTemplates

I also plan to post my generator to Github once I have it handling a few more tile types. Right now it handles thousands of custom metrics (that was the main goal) and the "honeycomb" tiles.

Thanks,

dave

Dave M. Kenneth G. · May 08, 2020 at 10:08 PM 2

Hi Kenneth,

I recreated my broken dashboards and the latest are now available here:

https://github.com/Dynatrace-Dave-Mauney/DashboardTemplates

This folder has the latest ones:

https://github.com/Dynatrace-Dave-Mauney/DashboardTemplates/tree/master/v1.192.96

Hope this helps,

dave

Kenneth G. Dave M. · May 16, 2020 at 05:09 PM 1

Thanks so much

Angel A. · Jun 10, 2020 at 04:28 PM 1

Hello!

Thank you so much for creating this. It's been very helpful for our use case. We were wondering if the Journey creation is working.

I'm using the LiteUserJourney (w/o KPI) but I get a JS warning when trying to upload it, and no journey is created on the dashboard.

This is the error we get:

jQuery.Deferred exception: whereClauseSwaps is not defined uploadFunnel/<@https://dynatrace.github.io/BizOpsConfigurator/js/dtAPI.js:387:5
e@https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js:2:30005
l/</t<@https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.5.1/jquery.min.js:2:30307

Thanks!

Lucas H. Angel A. · Jun 19, 2020 at 02:43 PM 1

Hi @Angel A., I did see that there were a couple problem cards on the 10th. I had a bad code push that day, that was subsequently fixed. Could you please try again?

I've adopted some standard Dynatrace practices to make sure if it happens again, it's fixed quickly:
1) A user-friendly error screen if things break
2) A synthetic test running against https://dynatrace.github.io/BizOpsConfigurator
3) Davis Assistant in one of my slack channels to notify me, and
4) Dynatrace API events pushed directly from git during a code push, so that I know exactly which build broke things
Sorry for the poor experience. That should be better going forward.

Thanks for reaching out!

John K. · Jun 25, 2020 at 04:01 PM 1

Need visibility into your marketing campaigns with #Dynatrace? Goto https://bit.ly/3evaanf, connect your tenant & select New Flow Deploy. Persona - App Owner or Digital Marketer. Use Case - Marketing Campaign. Workflow - Digital Business Analytics - Marketing Campaign Overview.

Prereqs

Create a session property for your campaign (i.e. Web property pack - web_utm_campaign query string)
Create a session property for revenue (i.e. revenue - CSS selector)
Create a session property for a successful conversion (i.e. "Order processed." - CSS selector)
Create a metric for the campaign session property
Create a metric for the revenue session property
Create 4 additional metrics for each GEO location (i.e. Asia, Europe, Virginia, California)
Mark the last user action step as a key user action for the user journey

mco.png (115.4 KiB)

Arnit K. · Jul 27, 2020 at 08:29 AM 2

Hi @Lucas H.

We are trying to set this grate tool in offline mode and face few unclear subjects:

a. referring to external resources :

1. github in githubapi.js

2. Jquery (*3) in index.html

Do we need to change any of them to local?

We changed the above to local and managed to connect to our local BizOpsConfogurator (over IIS 7) and to connect to the dynatrace managed with the token.

When we click on "deploy" after connecting to the environment we get and error regarding TenantOverview.json -- > Cannot read property 'repo' of undefined

b. There are bf tht trying t be send to your dynatrace SaaS tenant - probably comming from src="https://js-cdn.dynatracelabs.com/jstag/145e049b9b1/bf49960xxn/b94c132cf8396fed_complete.js"; in index.html - We removed it as our browser are not connect to the internet, is that OK?

c. We have upload the offline package to our offline BizOpsConfigurator we see in config page dashboardV5 but in dashboard.txt all the lines point to dashbaoardV4, is that OK?

Can you please advise here what did we done wrong and help us to complete the offline setup?

Thanks in advance

Arnit & @Yos N.

Yos N. Arnit K. · Jul 28, 2020 at 02:45 PM 1

Hi @Lucas H.

We investigate bit more the issue and installed on a machine that do connect to the internet the offline version and replicate the problem by mapping api.github.com, in hosts file, to unreachable IP.

We also succeed to to workaround the problem of deploy, by download some jsons from api.github.com directories and alter the offline pack to point to to the local directories instead of api.github.com

Our question is if we missed something on the way and if not, will there be an option to get the offline pack with local links instead of api.github.com together with git clone option of the all the repos?

Thanks in advance

@Gil G. & Yos

Lucas H. Yos N. · Jul 29, 2020 at 01:03 AM 2

Hi @Arnit K. & @Yos N.,

I went back through and did some testing, since I hadn't done much "offline mode" since changing some data structures. Let me answer each part in turn:

a. You should not need to make any source code changes. The .js files that are loaded from CDN will load a local copy if the CDN fails. Just make sure that when you download / checkout the source that submodules are initialized. If you look in the 3rdparty directory, the subdirectories should not be empty.

b. This is just dynatrace monitoring of BizOpsConfigurator. You're welcome to take it out or if you'd like, feel free to monitor with your own Dynatrace.

c. I did need to make a change to the Download/UploadOfflinePack functions. If you download a new pack, it should be about 4.7MB (currently). The incorrect ones were ~ 20MB. I also added a "OfflineMode" checkbox in the Gear menu as well. It should work without this, but this prevents the calls and any "normal" error messages. I also tweaked the buttons so that it's more clear when you can download or upload an offlinepack: dashboards loaded in memory = download enabled, no dashboards loaded = upload enabled. Be sure to download a new copy of the source code.

I also tested using request blocking in chrome dev tools:

Give it a try once more please. If that doesn't work, please email me at Lucas dot Hocker AT dynatrace dot com and we can setup a meeting to go through it together.

screen-shot-2020-07-28-at-75738-pm.png (321.6 KiB)

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Lucas H. Lucas H. · Jul 29, 2020 at 11:15 PM 2

I've also added a demo video under the in-tool FAQ. Which can be reached directly here: https://dynatrace.github.io/BizOpsConfigurator/howto/demo-offlinemode.mp4

Arnit K. Lucas H. · Aug 03, 2020 at 06:26 AM 1

Hi Lucas,

Thank you so mach

It is working as a charm!

Regards,

Arnit

Yos N. · Nov 15, 2020 at 03:01 PM 0

Hi @Lucas H.

We are trying powerup chrome plugin and its awesome !!!

Just 2 issues we are straggling with

1. Some times when we leave the dashboard to refresh on his own it stuck and ask if we want to wait for the page to refresh or exit

2. After upgrade of chrome version the plugin was update to 1.27 and its not working (i.e. not showing heatmaps nor tooltips .....) when downgrade back to 1.26 (we had a 1.26 crx at hand) is start to work again

Thanks in advance for your insight here

@Gil G. & Yos

Lucas H. Yos N. · Nov 15, 2020 at 03:07 PM 0

Hi @Yos N.,

- I'm not aware of issue 1. I'll see if I can recreate that somehow.

- For issue 2, I'm actively working on this now. It seems a new library got stripped during the build process. Here's a quick workaround, set the Library Location to GitHub:

Sorry about that issue,
-Lucas