dt-obs-ext-monitors

External Monitor Ingestion

Send 3rd-party test and monitor results to Dynatrace Grail using the events ingest API. This is the canonical replacement for the deprecated POST /api/v1/synthetic/ext/tests endpoint.

Overview

Events posted to /platform/ingest/custom/events/{endpoint} land in Grail and are processed by OpenPipeline, which:

• Extracts metrics (external.test.availability, external.test.duration) for alerting and SLOs
• Registers each unique test.id as an EXT_TEST Smartscape node — enabling Davis Problems to attach to a named entity ("External test X went down") rather than floating without topology context
• Adds result.status.category to step events (SUCCESS / SKIPPED / FAIL) for dashboard filtering

Two event types form a test result:

Type	Purpose
external_test_run	Overall pass/fail result for one test execution
external_test_step	One step within that run (optional; enables step-level metrics)

Authentication

Two token types are accepted:

Token type	Scope
Classic Api-Token	openpipeline.events.custom
Platform Token / OAuth	openpipeline:events.custom:ingest

Common wrong guess that does NOT work: events.ingest.

Quick Start

Prerequisite: The ingest endpoint must be created in OpenPipeline before sending events. The external.tests endpoint is provisioned automatically by the default Dynatrace 3rd-party monitors Monaco bundle. See references/event-ingestion.md for setup details and custom endpoint creation.

Send one minimal test result (replace external.tests with your configured endpoint name):

curl -X POST "https://{env-id}.live.dynatrace.com/platform/ingest/custom/events/external.tests" \
  -H "Authorization: Api-Token {token}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '[{
    "event.kind": "EXTERNAL_TEST_EVENT",
    "event.type": "external_test_run",
    "test.id": "my-api-health-check",
    "test.run.id": "a1b2c3d4-e5f6-7890-abcd-ef1234567890",
    "test.name": "My API Health Check",
    "test.type": "api",
    "test.run.status": "passed",
    "test.run.availability": 1,
    "test.run.duration_ms": 245,
    "test.run.location": "us-east-1",
    "dt.security_context": "team-checkout",
    "timestamp": "2024-01-15T10:30:00Z"
  }]'

Expected response: HTTP 200 (empty body).

Full event schema, step events, extended examples with error fields and CI metadata, Java DTO shapes, and DQL queries: references/event-ingestion.md

Verify in Grail

After sending, confirm the event appears:

fetch events, from:now()-1h
| filter event.type == "external_test_run"
| fields timestamp, test.id, test.name, test.run.status, test.run.duration_ms, test.run.location
| sort timestamp desc
| limit 20

Key Constraints

• Body must be a JSON array ([{...}]), not an object wrapper ({"events":[...]}).
• A single request can mix run events and step events in the same array.
• timestamp must be ISO 8601 UTC (e.g. "2024-01-15T10:30:00Z").
• test.run.availability must be integer 1 or 0, not a string.
• All step events in a run must share the same test.run.id and test.id as the parent run event.
• Step events must include test.step.id (unique within the run) in addition to test.run.id.
• event.kind: "EXTERNAL_TEST_EVENT" must be present — used by Grail for event classification. Routing to the correct pipeline is driven by event.type, not event.kind.
• Do not send dt.smartscape.ext_test or result.status.category — these are written by the pipeline after ingestion and will be overwritten if included.
• dt.security_context controls data access policies; it’s recommended to set it on every event to enable per-team access control and cost attribution in multi-team tenants.

Multi-Location Tests

Send the same test.id from multiple locations — each with a different test.run.location value — to build a multi-location test. OpenPipeline creates one EXT_TEST node per test.id and one availability metric timeseries per (test.id, location) pair.

This enables two alerting tiers out of the box:

Alert type	Fires when
Local outage	A single location's availability drops (per-location timeseries)
Global outage	Average across all locations drops below threshold (e.g. majority failing)

Threshold maths for a 3-location test: 1 location failing → avg 0.67 (no alert at 0.5 threshold); 2 failing → avg 0.33 (fires); all 3 failing → avg ≈ 0 (fires immediately).

Keep test.id stable across all locations — changing it creates a new Smartscape node and breaks metric history.

Related Skills

• dt-dql-essentials — DQL syntax for querying ingested events and building analysis queries
• dt-obs-frontends — Link test runs to frontend entities via dt.smartscape.frontend to draw EXT_TEST → FRONTEND dependency edges in Smartscape