Dynatrace Agents
The Dynatrace Agent is a lightweight component that is injected into an application layer. It retrieves data and sends it to theDynatrace Collector, which then correlates that data and sends it to the Dynatrace Server.
There are different Dynatrace Agents that are specifically designed for the following technologies and application layers:
- The Java Agent for various Java Runtime Environments is loaded by a JVM at startup if configured to do so according the configuration set using a JVM command line option.
- The .NET Agent for Microsoft Common Language Runtimes is loaded by a CLR and configured through global environment variables and enabled for individual processes using the .Net Agent configuration tool. So, this agent is always loaded but only active when enabled for a specific process.
- The Browser Agent for diagnosing Internet Explorer and Firefox is a browser add-on available for 32-bit browsers on Windows-based systems.
- The Web Server Agent for Internet Information Server and Apache Webserver has two components. One is a module that gets loaded as a Web Server Module, and the other component is a separate process that acts as the Web Server Agent which services all Web Servers on that machine. This architecture is common to have multiple Web Server instances running on a single Web Server Host. In order to optimize communication with the dynaTrace Collector, the communication is “proxied” through that process. This process is automatically launched by the Web Server Module on Linux machines and launched with the dynaTrace Web Server Agent on Windows machines. This is true for all supported Web Servers (Apache, IIS, and IBM HTTP Server).
- The PHP Agent for analyzing PHP application performance and behavior is an extension of the Web Server Agent that is supported on the Apache HTTP Server running on Linux. It gets loaded as a Web Server Module on the Apache server that hosts the PHP Engine.
- The JavaScript Agent for diagnosing Browser environments is a small JavaScript file that is injected into Web pages either automatically by indicating the “text/html” MIME type, or manually by using the <script> tag in the page header.
- Custom Agents created using the Agent Development Kit (ADK).
Venkat Matta 