Dynatrace private locations
What are private locations?
You can run your Dynatrace synthetic monitors from a private Synthetic location, which is a location in your private network infrastructure where you install one or more Synthetic-enabled ActiveGate instances.
How does this affect monitoring?
We have HTTP and browser monitors set up in dynatrace to check applications are reachable and displaying the expected pages.
If you add a new private dynatrace activegate, it will need added to the HMCTS Private Location so it can receive monitoring data.
You can find the locations setup in Dynatrace by going to the portal, clicking Synthetic from the left hand pane.
This will show you the synthetic monitors setup on our tenant.
On the left hand side, under Monitored locations, you will HMCTS Private Location.
This private location refers to the private activegates we have installed in one of our Azure subscriptions as a Virtual Machine Scale Set.
How can I add a new activegate to the private location?
Unfortunately, you cannot do this yourself as you probably won’t have permission.
Reach out to one of our contacts at Dynatrace to get this completed.
Ask the Platform Operations team for info on who specifically to contact as this changes over time.
How can I manually trigger a monitor to check an application is working during an outage?
Different monitors will be setup to run at different frequencies but if you need to manually check a monitor to see if it has come back during an outage you can click On-demand execution.
This was needed when we removed our old private activegates and the new ones had mistakenly not been added to the private location.
Once the new activegates had been added, rather than waiting another 15 mins for the particular monitor to run again, we clicked On-demand execution and were able to quickly confirm the synthetic monitor was working again.
