Cost Optimization
Dynatrace costs scale with data volume. Here's how to monitor and optimize spending.
💡 Cost & Carbon Optimization app: Dynatrace has a built-in app that calculates and monitors your IT cost (public list price) and carbon footprint. It tracks cloud infrastructure costs and carbon emissions from both cloud and on-premises electricity consumption. Open it via Ctrl+K → "Cost & Carbon Optimization".
DPS Cost Allocation
Use dt.cost.costcenter and dt.cost.product tags to allocate DPS usage to business units. The built-in Cost Allocation dashboard breaks down spending by cost center automatically.
DPS Pricing Model
What You Pay For How to Optimize
────────────────────────────────── ──────────────────────────────────
Host units (per host monitored) Right-size: full-stack vs infra-only
Log ingestion (per GB) Filter noisy sources in OpenPipeline
Metric ingestion (per metric) Disable unused extension metrics
DEM units (per user session) Sample RUM if volume is too high
Trace storage (per span) Adjust Adaptive Traffic Management
Find Your Biggest Cost Drivers
Log Volume by Source
fetch logs
| summarize cnt=count(), by:{log.source}
| sort cnt desc
| limit 10
Log Volume by Level
fetch logs
| summarize cnt=count(), by:{loglevel}
| sort cnt desc
If DEBUG or NONE logs dominate, filter them in OpenPipeline or reduce verbosity at the source.
Host Monitoring Mode
fetch dt.entity.host
| summarize cnt=count(), by:{monitoringMode}
Full-stack costs more than infrastructure-only. Switch non-critical hosts to infra-only.
Optimization Actions
Action Savings Impact Effort
────────────────────────────────── ─────────────── ──────
Filter DEBUG logs in OpenPipeline High Low
Switch dev hosts to infra-only Medium Low
Reduce log retention (custom bucket) Medium Medium
Disable unused extension metrics Low Low
Tune Adaptive Traffic Management Medium Medium
Use Segments instead of MZ clones Low Medium
Retention Optimization
Bucket Default Optimization
─────────────────── ───────── ──────────────────────────────
default_logs 35 days Create custom bucket: debug_logs → 7 days
default_spans 10 days Sufficient for most use cases
default_metrics 15 months Fixed — can't reduce
default_bizevents 35 days Increase for compliance if needed
💡 The #1 cost optimization: find your noisiest log source (summarize count(), by:{log.source}) and either filter it in OpenPipeline or reduce verbosity at the application. This alone can cut log costs by 30-50%.
🛠 Try it: Open Ctrl+K → "Cost & Carbon Optimization" → explore your infrastructure costs by service and host. Then open "Logs" → check which log sources produce the most volume — those are your biggest cost optimization targets.