Cost Intelligence with Dynatrace Assist
- Latest Dynatrace
- How-to guide
- 6-min read
- Published Jun 02, 2026
With Cost Intelligence, 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:
- Get an introduction to Cost Intelligence in Dynatrace and how it builds on Dynatrace Assist.
- Learn how to ask about your Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) consumption, forecast future usage, and find concrete optimization opportunities.
- See real-life examples for the three core scenarios: understand, predict, and optimize.
- Learn when to reach for Cost Intelligence, and when to use Account Management or hand-written DQL.
Target audience
This guide is written for:
- FinOps practitioners and finance stakeholders.
- Platform owners and platform engineers.
- Observability engineers and SREs.
- Team leads responsible for their team's consumption.
You don't need to have any prior DQL knowledge or experience to follow this guide, since Assist can translate natural language into queries and execute them.
What is cost intelligence?
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.
Cost Intelligence closes that gap. It pairs the Dynatrace data foundation of granular, real-time usage and billing data in Grail with the expertise built into Dynatrace Assist.
This allows you to answer cost questions across three core scenarios in a single conversation:
- Understand: See your top cost drivers and trace a cost spike back to its root cause, broken down by capability, team, or workload.
- Predict: Forecast your consumption for the coming days or months based on current usage, so month-end holds no surprises. Prediction works at the capability level, making it useful when onboarding new teams.
- Optimize: Get specific, actionable recommendations. For example, suggesting how to consolidate duplicated or overlapping queries that were discovered across users during the investigation.
Since Dynatrace Assist generates DQL behind the scenes, Cost Intelligence is the optimal way to produce queries you'd otherwise have to write yourself. You can ask Assist to show the query it used, then reuse it in a notebook, dashboard, or workflow.
Prerequisites
To use Cost Intelligence, you need the following Dynatrace features and permissions.
- Agentic Dynatrace Assist is enabled on your environment. Answering questions about your own consumption requires Assist to query live data in your environment.
- Generative AI permissions are assigned. At minimum, this includes
davis-copilot:conversations:execute,document:documents:*, andhub:catalog:read.
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:
- Dynatrace Assist works with consumption data for the environment that you're currently logged in to. For consolidated, account-level views across environments, use Account Management.
- Prices shown in the response represent list prices, not your actual invoice. Dynatrace Assist calculates costs using Dynatrace public list prices normalized per capability. If you want calculations that are based on your own rates, provide these rates in the conversation as a part of your prompt and ask Dynatrace Assist to recalculate.
- Account Management is always the source of truth for billing. For invoice-accurate numbers, always refer to the Account Management Portal.
How-to
Here's how to use Cost Intelligence to learn more about your costs.
- In Dynatrace, select Dynatrace Assist to open the chat interface.
- Provide your cost or usage question in plain language. See Examples below for a starting point.
- Select Run and wait for the response.
- Ask follow-up questions if needed. Dynatrace Assist retains the context of the conversation, so you can refine your input without having to start over.
- Dynatrace Assist automatically shows you DQL queries it uses. You can save these queries for later use in
Notebooks, 
Dashboards, and 
Workflows.
Examples
Here are some example scenarios where you can use Cost Intelligence 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.
If you're not sure how to phrase a question, or what needs to be explored further, you can use the following or a similar prompt to ask Dynatrace Assist: What cost drivers can you analyze for me?
This prompt is also a useful conversation starter for teams new to Dynatrace consumption.
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:
Break that down by host group.Compare this week's full-stack usage with last week's.
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:
Now show me the same forecast for the next 60 and 90 days.What would my log ingest cost be at my contracted rate of <your rate>?
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?
Assist will surface overlapping or redundant queries and name the specific queries involved.
Depending on the response, here are some possible follow-ups:
Which queries should I optimize first, and how?Give me a short summary I can share with the team.
When to use Dynatrace Assist
Dynatrace Assist with Cost Intelligence can supplement your existing tools.
Use:
- Cost Intelligence: when you want a fast, conversational answer without having to write DQL. Cost Intelligence can help you find cost drivers, trace a spike to its root cause, forecast at the capability level, or get optimization recommendations. It's the optimal way to generate DQL queries you can reuse elsewhere.
- Account Management: when you want invoice-accurate, contracted-rate numbers or a consolidated view across multiple tenants. Account Management is the source of truth for billing.
- Custom DQL: when you want to have full control over a query. This helps you build custom dashboards and scheduled workflows, or prepare an analysis that goes beyond what a Cost Intelligence conversation can cover. You can also use Dynatrace Assist to draft a query, and then refine it manually.
Next steps
- To dive deeper into Cost Allocation, and attribute consumption to specific teams or workloads, see Cost Allocation.
- To reuse a query that Dynatrace Assist generated, open a notebook or dashboard and paste the DQL there.
- For invoice-accurate totals and contracted-rate costs, open Account Management.
- To automate cost queries on a schedule, see Optimize DQL cost with Workflows.