DT to be aware that minor changes impact clients

[ct_27]

This post is just to have it documented and for DT to know that even minor changes cause impacts to clients. So we really need to know through the release notices or some other method when even the slightest of things change. 

This is more so with monitoring systems because by nature they are very intricate and fragile because we don't alert or monitor in large brushes, we have to do things at detailed brushes.

My situation seems minor but it's impacted all of our downstream notification systems.  Because the DT ServiceNow integration did not support custom ServiceNow fields we had to switch to using webhooks.  The Problem Notification would use "{ProblemDetailsText}" which used to end with information about the host. We would extract that data. Well now it ends with the following two line 'Root cause' and 'Based on our dependency analysis all incidents are part of the same overall probl'.   

This change in text ends up removing all the necessary details of the problem with this generic text.  Seems easy to solve but when you depend on vendors to configure your products it become a costly change to the client.

That's all, just reminding Dynatrace that small changes could have impact on customers.

[dirk_wall]

Hi ct_27,

Thanks for reaching out.
We are well aware of the responsibility that even minimal changes to the product can have a huge impact on our customer, especially in downstream system, as you pointed out. We are always trying to incorporate necessary changes into the product in such a way that no existing functionality is changed or impaired in any way. Since we've been in this business for several years, we all know that this is not always possible and then of course we try to keep the blast radius as small as possible and think twice or three times whether we should really make the change.
Looking at your specific situation, it seems like sometimes we can find the root cause for the problem and sometimes we can't. Depending on this, the message in the notification may look slightly different. We didn't change anything in the product in this area for quite some time now. If you want, we can look at your specific situation in detail to determine why we can't always identify a root case - please contact support if this is desired.

Cheers,
Dirk