Source external monitoring data and display it via Dynatrace dashboards
Hi all,
I am working with a Client who would like to use Dynatrace to display performance data from an external source for systems that form part of a complete business transaction but which are not monitored by Dynatrace e.g. Finacle and SAP. They currently write this data to a log file which tracks performance metrics e.g. number of transactions and response time for these systems and would like us to import this data into Dynatrace to act as a single dash-boarding source for performance metrics. I have reviewed the log file reader and this would not suit the requirement as it simply reports on the existence of a particular log entry. Splunk would address this quite easily but the Client is currently keen to use just Dynatrace for this requirement. Would this be possible?
Thanks a million
Dean
This is 100% possible, all you need to do is develop a Monitor Plugin that will read and process the log file and send the data to the Dynatrace server, the server then will take care of persiting the measures to the performance warehouse and you can chart it as you wish.
Of course there is a little bit of effort required since you need to develop the plugin, think about how the data comes in and what is considered a measure, etc, but that is what the plugin development is for 
Hi David
Thanks for your help. We'll investigate the plugin option further and update here once done.
Best regards
Dean
There should be generic plugin that allows you to define the filter and parse criteria to extract arbitrary measure data out of a log (or non-log) file. Current log scraping is pretty clunky with extra tables to track position. Log file management should just be built-in so we can write custom parsers easier. RFE?
