Ask cost questions with Dynatrace Assist

• Latest Dynatrace
• How-to guide
• 6-min read
• Updated on Oct 05, 2026

With Dynatrace Assist, you can move from a billing number to a root cause and on to concrete optimization steps by asking questions instead of writing DQL. Dynatrace Assist will translate your prompts into queries and execute them on its own.

Overview

In this guide, you will:

Target audience

This guide is written for:

You don't need to have any prior DQL knowledge or experience to follow this guide, since Dynatrace Assist can translate natural language into queries and execute them.

Why use Dynatrace Assist for cost analysis?

Most teams know how much they spent on observability, but it can be difficult to explain the reason behind the spending (which capability, which team, or which workload drove the change) or decide what to do about it. Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) spans many capabilities and signal types, and investigating a root cause from a billing number has traditionally required manual analysis and a working knowledge of DQL.

Dynatrace Assist closes that gap. It combines granular real-time usage and billing data from Grail, and Dynatrace's built-in expertise on consumption—so you can get answers without manual analysis or DQL.

Since it generates DQL behind the scenes, it can produce queries you'd otherwise have to write yourself. You can ask Dynatrace Assist to show the query it used, then reuse it in a notebook, dashboard, or workflow.

Prerequisites

To ask Dynatrace Assist cost questions, you need the following Dynatrace features and permissions.

For the full list of permissions and setup steps, see Get started with Dynatrace Intelligence agentic and generative AI.

Scope and limitations

Keep the following in mind before you start:

How-to

Here's how to use Dynatrace Assist to learn more about your costs.

Examples

Here are some example scenarios where you can use Dynatrace Assist to get actionable information about your usage and costs.

Treat the prompts below as templates: adjust the capability, timeframe, and grouping to match what you want to investigate.

Understand a cost spike

Suppose you've received an alert that your Full-Stack Monitoring costs have increased. You want to find the root cause without manually analyzing billing events.

In Dynatrace Assist, enter I received a cost alert that my full-stack costs have increased. Can you check if you find anything notable?

Depending on the response, here are some possible follow-ups:

Predict upcoming costs

Suppose you want to anticipate consumption for an upcoming period based on current trends, for example, before a budget review or when bringing a new team online.

In Dynatrace Assist, enter Based on my log ingest usage over the last 90 days, can you predict my next 30 days?

Depending on the response, here are some possible follow-ups:

Optimize usage

Suppose you want to reduce your spending on a capability and need concrete recommendations instead of a simple usage chart.

In Dynatrace Assist, enter Looking at optimizing my log query usage — are there any queries duplicated by multiple users? Dynatrace Assist will surface overlapping or redundant queries and name the specific queries involved.

Depending on the response, here are some possible follow-ups:

When to use Dynatrace Assist

Dynatrace Assist can supplement your existing tools.

Use:

Next steps