Set up Cost Allocation for OneAgent deployments
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- How-to guide
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You can use Cost Allocation to allocate your Dynatrace DPS usage on OneAgent deployments to the cost centers and products that you define.
You can allocate data that comes from hosts monitored with Foundation & Discovery, Infrastructure Monitoring, or Full-Stack Monitoring, such as:
- Logs: Log data that is ingested by OneAgent on these hosts, see Log Analytics.
- Metrics: Custom metrics that come from these hosts, see Metrics powered by Grail.
- Traces: Traces that are ingested as extended trace ingestion, and also OTel traces, see Traces powered by Grail.
Allocating costs in this way provides a transparent and detailed account of the Dynatrace expenditures that originate from each cost center or product, which in turn helps your organization optimize its budgets.
No matter your use case or tag strategy, you can easily implement Cost Allocation for OneAgent.
On this page, you'll learn how to set up Cost Allocation in One Agent deployments.
Overview
We recommend setting up Cost Allocation along organizational lines and deployment scopes. Suitable concepts include host groups and host names. These attributes are typically available for all the telemetry data that you ingest.
Generally, to add Cost Allocation information to your OneAgent data, you'll enrich your signals with the dt.cost.costcenter and dt.cost.product Grail attributes.
Dynatrace automatically propagates these attributes value from spans to the service entity for span data.
Depending on your tagging strategy and requirements, there are different ways to do this. If you only need to allocate costs at the host/host group (deployment) level of granularity, we recommend setting up Cost Allocation in OpenPipeline. This lets you use your existing host groups and host names without any changes to your setup. If you need more granularity, you can use OneAgent to add host tags with Cost Allocation metadata.
Map primary Grail fields with OpenPipeline
If you only need to allocate costs at the deployment level of granularity (host/host group), we recommend setting up Cost Allocation in OpenPipeline. This allows you to use your already-defined organizational lines or deployment scopes to set up Cost Allocation, and you don't need to make any changes to your existing deployment.
First, identify the primary Grail fields that you want to base your allocation on.
For OneAgent, these could be dt.host_group.id or host.name.
Next, use OpenPipeline to map these to dt.cost.costcenter or dt.cost.product.
OpenPipeline has a specific Cost allocation stage where you can do this, which is available at 
Settings > Process and contextualize > OpenPipeline > Logs > Pipelines > [Select a pipeline] > Cost allocation.
For more information, see Processing.
For more information about primary Grail fields, see Global field reference.
Set up at the host level
If you require a more sophisticated way to set up Cost Allocation, you can configure OneAgent to add specific Cost Allocation metadata at the host level.
The metadata you create can represent your own cost center architecture, and can even be hierarchical by encoding it into a string such as department-A/department-AB/team-C.
The sections below show you how to add, modify, and remove OneAgent host tags. You can do this either during or after OneAgent installation.
Add Cost Allocation metadata
OneAgent version 1.291+
You can configure Cost Allocation when you install OneAgent.
For information on OneAgent installation, see Install OneAgent on a server.
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On the Install OneAgent page, go to Optional parameters > Tags.
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Select Add tag.
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Enter the Key and Value as appropriate:
- The key is either
dt.cost.costcenterordt.cost.product. - The value is the name of the cost center or product. You've already defined cost centers and hosts in Identify allowed cost centers and products.
- The key is either
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Select Add.
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Continue to install OneAgent.
Modify Cost Allocation metadata
Past tracked consumption can't be changed or reassigned. If you modify Cost Allocation metadata, you'll lose all data about already-recorded costs (related to that metadata on that host).
Before you reassign a dt.cost.costcenter or dt.cost.product, you might want to export the data via the Dynatrace Platform Subscription API - GET cost allocation.
Before you change the values for dt.cost.costcenter or dt.cost.product, add or remove target values in the Cost Allocation allow lists.
This will ensure that no usage values are unassigned in the transition.
Updates to the allow list will take a couple of minutes to take effect.
OneAgent version 1.291+
To modify Cost Allocation metadata, follow the steps in Add Cost Allocation metadata. The new values will overwrite the current values. All changes are irreversible.
Remove Cost Allocation metadata
If you remove Cost Allocation metadata, you'll lose all data about already-recorded costs (related to that metadata on that host). All changes are irreversible.