Many organizations are investing in multicloud, making it critical to improve cloud operations. Learn how American Family Insurance implemented Dynatrace to increase resilience.
As more organizations invest in a multicloud approach, enhancing cloud operations and being observational for increased stability is becoming critical to keep pace with the rapid pace of digital change.
When American Family Insurance took the multicloud plunge, they turned to Dynatrace to automate Amazon Web Services (AWS) event ingestion, instrument computing and cloudless server technologies, and create a single workflow for unified event management.
At Dynatrace Perform 2022, Technology Services Manager Thomas Janik and AWS Monitoring SME Matt Gault, both from the American Family, explained how they strengthened their cloud operations to increase resilience. Additionally, Dynatrace’s Michał Naleziński, senior product manager, and Rob Jahn, senior technical partner manager, shared how Dynatrace helps teams overcome barriers in these complex environments, become more stable, and faster. to change.
Multicloud observability allows IT teams to focus on what matters most
The American Family turned to Dynatrace to help them keep track of complex environments without hassle. Dynatrace combines seamless automation and observability into a single, end-to-end platform. It provides visibility to organizations in their hybrid and multicloud infrastructures, giving teams contextual insights and accurate root cause analysis. With a single source of credibility, infrastructure teams can once again focus on innovation, improving user experiences, changing faster, and driving better business results.
Dynatrace OneAgent provides automatic full-stack data retrieval for dynamic multicloud environments. Additionally, PurePath provides distributed tracing with code -level detail to dimension with contextual data. Dynatrace’s most unique feature is built into the core of its platform: Davis. The smart AI engine instantly processes billions of dependencies for accurate answers, prioritizing them according to business impact and along with identifying the root for the issues.
“Dynatrace is business-ready, including automated deployment and support for the latest cloud-native architectures with role-based management,” Naleziński explains.
The American Family has turned to observability for cloud operations
When the American Family began making an application focused on a concept first in AWS, Janik and Gault had three requirements:
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A single tracking platform;
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Self -service skills; at
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The ability to drive orchestration within a single workflow tool for multiple event sources in ServiceNow.
The team couldn’t do everything within AWS, so they contracted a few pieces with several SaaS providers. American Family went through proofs of concept and cost-benefit evaluations to select a tracking solution. With capabilities such as application performance management, real user monitoring (RUM), and advanced Session Replay, the insurance company decided to move from an on -premises perspective to Dynatrace.
“Dynatrace’s out-of-the box AWS functionality and future roadmap functionality motivated us to convert to Dynatrace in 2020,” Janik said. After American Family completed its initial conversion to Dynatrace, they needed to automate how their system absorbed Amazon CloudWatch metrics.
Step 1: Automate the ingestion of AWS metrics using Dynatrace
American Family uses OneAgent installations and ingests Amazon CloudWatch metrics into Dynatrace to track resources across hundreds of AWS accounts. Now, the team has dashboard capabilities that go beyond what Amazon CloudWatch provides, including network visibility, entry and exit metrics, SLO tracking, and individual user endpoints for synthetic monitors.
“We quickly understood that there was a need for automation,” Gault said. The biggest requirement is to set up the required identity and access management (IAM) role in each AWS account to give Dynatrace access to CloudWatch metrics. American Family deployed this IAM function through the code pipeline to all existing AWS accounts. Then, the team will set up the provisioning process to integrate this IAM role into any new AWS account.
The American Family uses Python scripts to call the Dynatrace API, which sets up Dynatrace configuration for each account. To reduce the manual effort of account reconciliation and running scripts, they converted Python scripts to Lambda functions. This gave them a separate Lambda function for each Dynatrace environment in their managed cluster.
“Each Lambda function has an automated account reconciliation process that asks for the landing zone organization ID. It compares that list to the previous run to automatically add any new account to the Dynatrace console,” Gault explains. Once Dynatrace accounts are set up, the system will ask Amazon CloudWatch for new metrics every five minutes. It only costs about $ .01 for every 1,000 metrics.
Step 2: Instrument computing and serverless cloud technology
Once the American Family has completed event ingestion, they need to provide a simple, reusable way for application teams to be able to compute instrument and cloudless technologies without a server using Dynatrace OneAgent.
“We adopted OneAgent Lambda monitoring early. So, we published documentation, including a template for the application team, to set up their code to add OneAgent to their Lambda functions, “Gault explained.
To boost its cloud operations, American Family developed AWS Systems Manager (SSM) parameters that they distributed to each AWS account for the ARN layer, hosted on Dynatrace AWS accounts. This allowed them to provide a OneAgent version for each supported Lambda runtime. The American Family set up SSM parameters for the environmental variables required for OneAgent ingestion, such as tenant and wrapper information.
From there, the American Family set up templates in both AWS CloudFormation and Terraform for Amazon EC2, ECS, and Kubernetes. They also enabled RUM for Lambda functions, giving PurePath visibility into AWS functions using the X-DTC header. In addition to AWS Lambda, they can now track user experience in single-page apps. PurePath provides options when OneAgent is not available – such as SaaS providers, shared infrastructure, or areas where other tracking agents may be in place.
American Family has also implemented agentless monitoring for user experience in vendor applications. These capabilities provide enterprise-wide transactional tracing across multiple data centers, cloud accounts, and instances.
Step 3: Create a single workflow for unified event management
Next, American Family needs to use a workflow service for event and incident management from multiple sources – such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Dynatrace, and other proprietary tracking services. . They have different components that send tracking data to Dynatrace. From there, Dynatrace led the orchestration that took place at ServiceNow. The orchestration is handled by ServiceNow because, from an event management perspective, that’s their source of credibility.
The American Family has created an on-premises synthetic monitor that will automatically restart the JVM if it has a 503 error.
“When this alert is triggered, Dynatrace retrieves the information and runs the script in ServiceNow. It will remove the JVM from the load balancer, restart the JVM, and return the JVM to rotation. And then the JVM will close. synthetic problem with Dynatrace to prove that the issue has been fixed, ”Gault explains. “It all happens without impact on the customer,” he added.
Full cloud observability for increased resilience
American Family plans to expand tracking throughout the enterprise using Dynatrace as a source of credibility.
“Dynatrace works closely with cloud vendors to provide the broadest view of multicloud environments. This includes metrics, logs, distributed tracing, and user experience data, ”says Naleziński of Dynatrace.
Instead of assembling a loosely coupled tool set and displaying observability data on dashboards, Dynatrace keeps the information on a unified, all-in-one platform, in context, and tied to business impact. Advanced observability allows better time to market, efficiency, cloud operations, and lower total cost of ownership than the overall goal of data analytics solutions.
Dynatrace provides out-of-the-box support for all major cloud platforms and hundreds of technologies. It also supports custom integrations for APIs. Therefore, organizations can extend their capabilities to existing ecosystems and drive automation in development, deployment, business processes, and application security.
To learn more about how American Family Insurance used Dynatrace to achieve cloud operations for increased resilience, watch the Dynatrace Perform session.
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