Dynatrace File System Monitoring: Complete Step-by-Step Guide with Prerequisites & Best Practices

File System Monitoring in Dynatrace

File system monitoring is an extension-based feature in Dynatrace that helps to monitor the file count, file modification age count, file age, and file size in a particular location or directory of the server. So it is also essential in SRE practices and Server Administration to prevent the outages caused by disk full issues and failing mount points.

In Dynatrace Monitoring, it helps avoid performance degradation, compliance issues, and sometimes unexpected downtime.

Prereqisites

1. Dynatrace Environment
2. OneAgent Installation
3. Active Gate Installation
4. Required Permissions
5. Supported OS

Dynatrace Environment

We need a Dynatrace Environment to perform File system monitoring, either SaaS or Managed. and make sure that you have proper Environment Admin Access in Dynatrace.

OneAgent Installation

We need to install Dynatrace OneAgent on the server before we start monitoring the file system. OneAgent will collect all the default information of the server, like mount points, etc.

 

Active Gate Installation

Without installing Dynatrace Active Gate, you are not able to configure the file system monitoring, because here we are dealing with an extension: File System Monitoring. Active Gate is Mandatory.

Required Permissions

1. You should have at least Environment Admin Access in Dynatrace to Configure the File System Monitoring Extension. We are going to configure File System Monitoring in the File System Monitoring Extension in Dynatrace HUB
2. Later, you might have to configure the alert setup for filesystem monitoring in metric events and the Davis Anomaly Detector, so please have proper access in your Dynatrace Environment
3. You should have admin and sudo permissions on the server for troubleshooting
4. If the server is Linux, Make Sure the dtuser account has access to your server file system.
5. Please note down the path or directory for which location you want to monitor the file system in the server. (example: C:\praveenstats/)

Supported OS

1. Windows
2. Linux 

Configuration: File System Monitoring in Dynatrace

Once you have completed all the prerequisites that were mentioned above, proceed with below steps

 

Step 1: Navigate to File System Monitoring Extension in Dynatrace

Log in to your Dynatrace Environment and navigate to Dynatrace HUB and followed by search for File System Monitoring in Dynatrace HUB as shown in the snapshot below.

Step 2: Start Configuring File System Monitoring

Click on Configure and select the Scope of the Monitoring, Single Host, Active Gate Group that as shown in the snapshot below.

For your information, I have selected Single Host for Tutorial purposes, and you can apply the scopes accordingly as per your requirement.

Select the required server to which you want to enable the file system monitoring. and keep the path or directory handy.

Select the check type based on your requirement. Here, I am choosing Count. I want to know the count of files that have been present in the following path or directory ( C:\praveenstats/*). As shown in the snapshot below, I want to monitor the number of files in the praveenstats path on the server's C drive.

Set the frequency for monitoring, i.e, every time within the given frequency, the extension will run and pull the data from the server.

If you want to run this file system monitoring execution only on specific days that you can mention in scheduling, as shown in the screenshots below (Here I am disabling the execution on Tuesday and Saturday), I don't want alerts or monitoring of the file system on the specific days.

Once you have configured the file system monitoring extension successfully, you can see the status OK.  If you could see Pending status, please wait for 5-10 minutes, then check the status as you configured the extension a few minutes ago. If you could see ERROR, WARN, please try to reconfigure the extension again and validate all the steps. There might be something wrong in the process.

Check the Data in Data Explorer

Once you have configured the file system monitoring for the server and validated all the steps, you can check the data in Data Explorer, as shown in the snapshot below. I have configured it for the count of files in the path of the server. In the server, I could see 13 files were present in the path, so I am seeing the same in the Data Explorer in Dynatrace.

Server Level Information

Data Explorer in Dynatrace

Filter with the proper metric key (search with file system) and then filter with path and host. Please provide the path that you have configured.

If you have any doubts, please mention them in the comment section

If you want more information on File System Monitoring, please refer to Dynatrace Official Documentation

Watch the Complete Tutorial on YouTube