Monitor your Heroku applications with Dynatrace

We’re happy to announce the public beta release of the Heroku buildpack for Dynatrace OneAgent. With this buildpack, Dynatrace has once again broadened its support for cloud platforms listed on the CNCF Cloud Native landscape.

Talk nerdy to me

Heroku is a container-based platform as a service (PaaS) that supports developers in deploying and running cloud-native applications. Heroku buildpacks are at the heart of Heroku’s polyglot platform and allow you to extend its build system. Buildpacks transform deployed code into a slug which can then be executed on a dyno.

The buildpack for Dynatrace OneAgent enables cloud-native monitoring of your Heroku application by integrating Dynatrace OneAgent into your application’s slug and dyno—without modification of your applications’ source code. This also means that if you scale your Heroku application and add additional web dynos to serve requests, Dynatrace will automatically scale as well.

To start monitoring your Heroku application you simply add the buildpack for Dynatrace OneAgent as an additional buildpack to your application.

heroku buildpacks:add https://github.com/Dynatrace/heroku-buildpack-dynatrace.git

For complete details, please see the Dynatrace Heroku installation guidelines.

Value-add at a glance

With Dynatrace cloud-native monitoring enabled for your Heroku applications, you get

• Deep application monitoring and code-level details for Java, PHP, Node.js and more – with just a single, language-independent buildpack
• Automatic root cause analysis of your Heroku web applications
• Insights into how your Heroku applications use databases — including detailed metrics for each database statement
• Real user monitoring data on customers’ web browser and mobile device behavior
• Automated external and third-party service monitoring (e.g., calls to external REST APIs)

Gain deep visibility into your Heroku dynos and applications

After linking your Dynatrace account with your Heroku application, you’ll receive the full range of application and service monitoring visibility that Dynatrace provides (for example, Smartscape and service-level insights with Service flow). Dynatrace automatically detects that your application is running on Heroku as well as services related to you Heroku application.

Dynatrace automatically initiates deep application monitoring for your Heroku applications and provides code-level visibility into your applications’ services. Dynatrace Service flow allows you to track how requests to services provided by your Heroku application are propagated through a system. Service tracing also helps to identify performance bottlenecks and failed requests in the service-to-service communication chain. With Dynatrace, it’s never been easier to pinpoint the root cause of poor performance in heterogeneous microservices stacks.

Tag your Heroku applications

You can use Dynatrace’s powerful tagging mechanism to automatically organize and filter all monitored Heroku application components. Dynatrace allows you to apply tags to processes and hosts based on environment variables.

heroku config:set DT_TAGS=owner=team-easytravel

Learn about the advantages

The Heroku buildpack for Dynatrace OneAgent is language independent and can be used with any Dynatrace supported language, including Node.js-based applications. If you’ve used the Dynatrace NPM module for PaaS module you can remove it from your dependencies as the buildpack discovers and instruments your Node.js applications automatically.

You also no longer need to rely on releases of the Dynatrace OneAgent dependencies for NPM. The Heroku buildpack for Dynatrace OneAgent automatically fetches the latest version of Dynatrace OneAgent so you receive potential fixes as quickly and easily as possible. If you’ve specified a default OneAgent install version for new hosts and applications in your OneAgent update settings, the Heroku buildpack for Dynatrace OneAgent will download the defined default version of Dynatrace OneAgent.

Your feedback

We’d love to hear from you. Tell us what you think about the Heroku buildpack for Dynatrace OneAgent. Please share your feedback at Dynatrace Community.

Note: The Heroku buildpack for Dynatrace OneAgent supersedes the Dynatrace NPM module for PaaS and requires OneAgent v1.141 or higher.