I am pretty new to the world of monitoring.
We have some spring boot apps deployed in production, and we're already using Dynatrace as our monitoring tool. After reading the documentation of dynatrace I learned that out-of-the-box OneAgent can automatically discover my entire Java application stack and monitor it.
I also learned about the micrometer dynatrace registry as a way to export spring boot Actuator metrics to OneAgent ingest API.
What is the difference between using micrometer dynatrace registry to send metrics to OneAgent vs. letting OneAgent scrape metrics from processes running in our host machines?
I am asking this question because I want to know what value the micrometer dynatrace registry can add to the table over OneAgent scrapping Java processes.
I am one of the Dynatrace DevRels and hope to provide some input into this discussion. The benefit of the OneAgent plus the Micrometer Dynatrace integration is that you get the additional metrics that SpringBoot exposes via Micrometer. While OneAgent by default captures a lot of metrics out of the box I agree with Jonatan that adding the specific instrumentation metrics to the mix will be beneficial for your observability implementation. Dynatrace will analyze those additional metrics in context of our smartscape topology model which will make the Dynatrace root cause analysis even better. Therefore my recommendation is use OneAgent + Micrometer. To add some more context to the points Jonatan brought up. OneAgent is a native and not a java agent which means instrumentation doesnt happen via AOP -> it therefore works for all java byte code. But to repeat what I said earlier -> I agree with him on leveraging the specific Micrometer metrics that Spring Boot is exposing. This will clearly be a benefit for you More information on Dynatrace Micrometer can be found on the Dynatrace Hub: https://www.dynatrace.com/hub/detail/micrometer/ Hope this answer helps