Dynatrace : What is OpenShift and why automation matters

What is OpenShift?

Red Hat OpenShift is a hybrid cloud platform. It offers automated installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management throughout the container stack - the operating system, Kubernetes and cluster services, and applications - on any cloud. OpenShift gives organizations the ability to build, deploy, and scale applications faster, all while supporting Kubernetes for cloud-native applications with enterprise security.

As organizations look to transform and modernize, OpenShift allows you to scale to grow your business through cloud-native development. OpenShift and Kubernetes simplify access to underlying infrastructure and help manage the application lifecycle and development workflows.

OpenShift automation

OpenShift is an amazing platform for building and shipping cloud-native applications. However, with dynamic containers running in microservices, with increasingly frequent code pushes, and levels of abstraction away from the cloud infrastructure, how do you know how your applications are performing at any given time?

Automation has become a major trend during 2020. The concept of automation has become part of organizations' overall digital transformation strategy for cloud-native environments. Why is automation so important? Let's take a deeper look into containers.

Containers can be challenging to monitor as they are always changing. As organizations shift from monolithic to microservices, the number of containers supporting these microservices explode, over time, to hundreds and thousands of nodes. With these dynamic environments, you need visibility into the cluster performance and application health. Container health is just one piece of the puzzle. Knowing the health of your container, while important, doesn't give you the complete picture. You need to know the health of the service that is running the container. If you've ever been in a war room, you'll understand this importance!

Manually installing different agent types, or collecting and correlating metrics, is simply ineffective. That's why automation is critical as it solves the challenge of making sense of dependencies, within the context of the entire technology stack to understand the impact on users and prevent business-impacting issues.

I'd like to note, not all automation is created equal. You may get a dashboard view but will fall short in dynamic environments.

When using OpenShift, you need automation monitoring of cloud-native workloads and microservices/containers to understand all relationships and dependencies across the cloud stack.

Dynatrace & OpenShift:

Dynatrace's Software Intelligence Platform provides automated, AI-assisted answers that can scale to the largest and most complex environments. Dynatrace can monitor and orchestrate applications, clusters, and underlying cloud infrastructure in OpenShift. Dynatrace automates your entire hybrid multicloud ecosystem and provides a full-stack overview of your cloud environment, starting with the underlying infrastructure up to the real user.

Dynatrace AI continuously maintains a complete real-time topology and dependency map of your environment so you can always see the health of your applications, the health of your container processes and the health of your code running inside, all in context to each other.

Dynatrace has simplified this process through the OneAgent Operator, which uses Kubernetes-native means to roll out OneAgent to OpenShift nodes. Once deployed, Dynatrace OneAgent automatically injects the OneAgent into applications containers with automated visibility into CRI-O containers and traces.

If there's a problem, Dynatrace identifies it and provides in-depth root cause analysis.

For more information on how Dynatrace & Red Hat OpenShift, check out this case study from or read this blog from Red Hat, The Power of OpenShift, The Visibility of Dynatrace.