Smart observability: how MeasureWorks made CV downloads secure and verifiable for a government client
Every day, thousands of job seekers rely on digital services to take their next career step. For a large government organization responsible for assisting job seekers, job applications must run smoothly and securely. One critical process within this service is the downloading of resumes and other application documents. But how do you ensure that these remain controllable without sacrificing the user experience?
The challenge: getting a grip on CV downloads
This government organization had to comply with strict laws and regulations around data management. One of the requirements was complete control over who, when and how many applications were downloaded. To prevent abuse and overload, a limit was set: a maximum of 1,000 downloads per user per day, with immediate notification once this limit was exceeded.
Sounds simple, but in practice, this proved to be a technical challenge. The client was working with Dynatrace Managed as its observability platform – a deliberate choice because of its data privacy and security benefits. Unlike the SaaS variant of Dynatrace, in which a simple DQL query would enable this monitoring, the managed version offered no standard solution to effectively monitor this download limit.
The technical challenge: monitoring outside standard solutions
Dynatrace works with user actions (such as clicking, scrolling, and downloading) and user sessions (complete user journey within an application). This meant we had to find a way to link two core metrics:
✔ How often a user downloads a CV.
✔ Which user performs this action.
To make this insightful, we applied the following configuration:
A custom user action metric that records each download.
A user session property that associates a user ID with each session.
But here was the limitation: Dynatrace Managed only supports sliding window alerting with a maximum window of 60 minutes. That works fine for continuous monitoring, but not for peak detection over a longer period of time-precisely what was needed to monitor the daily download limit.
Our solution: Customization beyond the boundaries of Dynatrace
At MeasureWorks, we believe that monitoring doesn’t stop at the boundaries of a platform. We developed a smart, scalable solution that leverages two powerful APIs within Dynatrace:
The Dynatrace Metric API to retrieve download data per user.
The Dynatrace Events API generates alerts as soon as an overrun occurs.
Using a Python script that runs every five minutes, we built a custom detection system:
✔ Retrieving all download options per user via the Metric API.
✔ Store this data in a local file.
✔ Check if a user exceeds the 1000-download limit on a day.
✔ Activate an alert via the Events API, including: user ID, time of crossing, number of downloads, the web application involved.
The result: control and security
With this solution, the client fully meets privacy and compliance requirements, while the IT team has real-time visibility into application usage. Because the monitoring runs within the existing Dynatrace Managed platform, the solution remains secure, efficient and easy to extend to other use cases.
At MeasureWorks, we don’t stop at standard solutions. We build on existing observability technology and develop smart, flexible solutions that go beyond the capabilities of the platform itself. In this way, we help our customers not only solve problems, but also increase their digital maturity.
