Architecture & Maturity
Designing Dynatrace for enterprise scale — environment strategy, cost allocation, and measuring platform maturity.
Environment Strategy
Pattern When to Use Environments
────────────────────── ────────────────────────────────── ──────────────
Single environment Small teams, one product 1 env
Multi-environment Separate prod/staging/dev 2-4 envs
Multi-account Enterprise with compliance needs Multiple accounts
Data Architecture
Layer What It Controls Tool
────────────────── ────────────────────────────────── ──────────────────
Data Partitioning Where data is stored (buckets) Grail buckets + retention
Data Access Who can see what data IAM + ABAC policies
Data Segmentation How data is filtered in the UI Segments
Cost Allocation
Use host tags to allocate costs to teams and products:
Tag Key Purpose
─────────────────────── ──────────────────────────────
dt.cost.costcenter Map hosts to cost centers
dt.cost.product Map hosts to products
dt.security_context Map hosts to teams (for ABAC)
Maturity Assessment
Measure your Dynatrace deployment maturity across 4 stages:
Stage Score Name What It Means
───── ────── ────────────── ──────────────────────────────────────────────
1 0-25 Foundational OneAgent installed, basic dashboards, siloed tools
2 26-50 Intermediate Alerting, SLOs, log analytics, some automation
3 51-75 Advanced Correlation, anomaly detection, workflows, security
4 76-100 Proactive AI-driven, auto-remediation, full platform adoption
8 Maturity Criteria
Criteria What to Check
──────────────────────── ──────────────────────────────────────────────
Infrastructure Hosts monitored, full-stack mode, host tags
Service & Application Services detected, RUM configured, user sessions
Dashboards & Analytics Custom dashboards, notebooks
Alerting & SLOs P1+P3 alert pairs, SLO targets, burn rate
Automation Workflows, Davis triggers, service user actors
Synthetic Monitoring HTTP monitors, browser clickpaths
Security Attack protection, vulnerability alerting
Platform Adoption Extensions, logs, business events, IAM groups
💡 Run a maturity assessment every 3 months. The goal is not to reach 100% — it's to identify the highest-impact improvements for your specific environment.
What You've Learned
Congratulations — you've completed the Zero to Hero course. You now know how to:
- Navigate the Dynatrace platform and understand its architecture
- Write DQL queries for metrics, logs, entities, and traces
- Build dashboards, set up alerts, and define SLOs
- Create workflows for automation and notifications
- Manage configuration as code with Terraform and Monaco
- Configure access control with IAM and ABAC
- Extend monitoring with extensions and custom apps
- Assess and improve platform maturity
Next steps: explore the Extensions 2.0 course for custom monitoring, the Apps course for custom app development, or the Gen3 Migration guide if you're upgrading from classic Dynatrace.
🛠 Try it: Open Ctrl+K → "Cost & Carbon Optimization" to see your infrastructure costs and carbon footprint. Then open "Account Management" → review your environment count, user count, and license consumption. This is your architecture baseline.
Host Unit Sizing
Dynatrace licenses hosts by RAM size:
RAM Full-Stack HU Infra-Only HU
───────── ───────────── ─────────────
≤ 1.6 GiB 0.10 0.03
≤ 8 GiB 0.50 0.15
≤ 16 GiB 1.0 0.3
≤ 32 GiB 2.0 0.6
≤ 64 GiB 4.0 1.0 (capped)
Infra-only mode is capped at 1.0 HU per host regardless of RAM. Hosts running less than 5 minutes don't count.
DPS Capabilities
Each capability you use consumes DPS credits: Full-Stack Monitoring, Infrastructure Monitoring, Code Monitoring, Runtime Vulnerability Analytics, Runtime Application Protection, RUM, Session Replay, Synthetic (browser + HTTP), Log Ingest/Retain/Query, Events, Automation Workflows, AppEngine Functions.
Track consumption: fetch dt.system.events | filter event.kind == "BILLING_EVENT"