AutomationEngine Connectors — Dynatrace Workflow Integrations

Overview

Dynatrace AutomationEngine is a BizDevSecOps workflow automation engine built into the Dynatrace platform. It enables teams to automate multi-cloud IT processes — from incident response to release validation — using a no/low-code graphical editor, scheduled triggers, and real-time Dynatrace Intelligence events.

Connectors are the extensibility layer: they wire AutomationEngine workflows to third-party tools and services without leaving the Dynatrace platform.

My Role

As a Senior Software Engineer at Dynatrace, I was part of the founding team that built the first AutomationEngine connectors — starting with Slack and Jira — and contributed to virtually all connectors that followed, either through direct implementation or via shared libraries used across the connector ecosystem.

Over the course of the project I:

Founded and shaped the connector platform — designed and built the initial Slack and Jira integrations that established the patterns used by all subsequent connectors
Contributed across the connector catalogue — direct code contributions or library-level contributions to nearly every connector listed below
Created and reviewed hundreds of PRs — maintained code quality and consistency across the growing connector suite
Onboarded new developers — brought engineers up to speed on the connector architecture, tooling, and contribution workflow
Contributed to Dynatrace-workflow-samples — 7th contributor out of 25 on the public samples repository

The individual connector implementations are part of the closed-source Dynatrace platform.

Connectors Built

Third-party integrations

Connector	Capabilities
Jira	Create, query, comment, transition, resolve tickets
Slack	Send notifications
GitHub	Trigger builds, manage repositories
GitLab	GitLab workflow actions
PagerDuty	Incident management
ServiceNow	Create incidents from monitoring data
Red Hat Ansible	Run Ansible playbooks
Kubernetes	Query/manipulate pods, deployments, services
Snowflake	Access, query, and store data
Jenkins	Trigger builds, query job status
Microsoft Azure	Azure cloud automation
AWS	AWS environment integration
Microsoft Teams	Send Teams notifications
Microsoft 365 / Entra ID	M365 and identity management

Dynatrace-native integrations

Site Reliability Guardian, Dynatrace Intelligence (AI/forecasting), Business Observability, Synthetic Monitoring, Ownership routing, Email, Text Processing (JSON/YAML).

Tech Stack

Toolchain: Dynatrace App Toolkit (dt-app CLI) — scaffold, develop, deploy
Action logic: TypeScript (.action.ts) — runs serverless on Dynatrace AppEngine
Widget UI: React + TypeScript (.widget.tsx) — rendered inside the Workflow editor
Component libraries: @dynatrace-sdk/automation-action-utils, @dynatrace/automation-action-components, @dynatrace/strato-components-preview
Scripting: JavaScript (inline Run JavaScript actions), Jinja2 expressions
Query language: DQL (Dynatrace Query Language)
Config-as-code: Terraform, API JSON
Connectivity: EdgeConnect for on-premises integration
Testing: Jest (action + widget test configs generated by dt-app)

Timeline

~2022 — AutomationEngine launched
2022–2026 — Ongoing connector development

Blog Posts

Build custom workflow actions using the Dynatrace App Toolkit (Dynatrace Blog, May 2024) — I wrote this guide walking through how to scaffold a custom connector with dt-app, implement the action logic in TypeScript, build a React widget UI, and deploy to a Dynatrace environment.

Effects