Monitor hosts that send OpenTelemetry data to Dynatrace

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How-to guide
2-min read
Published Mar 28, 2025

OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring is a Dynatrace feature that transforms raw telemetry data from OpenTelemetry Collectors into actionable insights. Rather than simply ingesting metrics, logs, and traces, Dynatrace automatically builds meaningful context around your infrastructure. It creates host and process entities, establishes topology relationships, and presents data through purpose-built analysis screens.

With the extension, you can:

Explore your OpenTelemetry-monitored hosts and processes directly within Infrastructure & Operations. There, you'll find dedicated views for your otel:host and otel:process entities, complete with metric visualizations, related logs, and topology.

Use auto-generated entities (based on extracted metadata) to correlate metrics, logs, and spans and provide unified context across your monitoring environment.

Set up alerts to notify you of condition changes on the host, like load level increases.

Prerequisites

This use case assumes that you have:

One of the following Collector distributions with the hostmetrics receiver and the following processors: resourcedetection, filter, and transform.
Activated the OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring extension. For more information about the extension, see OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring extension.

Reference configuration

A reference configuration is available in the Dynatrace OTel Collector's GitHub repo, see host-metrics.yaml. In Infrastructure & Operations Infrastructure & Operations, the ready-made visualizations are optimized for this configuration.

You can use this configuration as-is, or modify it to meet your specific needs. However, if you make significant changes to the configuration, the visualizations may not work as intended. For entity extraction to work, you need to keep the existing host and process attributes.

Components

For our configuration, we configured the following components that are specific to this extension.

Receivers

Under receivers, we specify the hostmetrics receiver.

The hostmetrics receiver is optimized with various collection intervals (1 minute, 5 minutes, 1 hour).

Use short intervals for the most important metrics to ensure that Dynatrace provides fast alerts for important changes.
Send non-critical metrics less frequently to help control consumption and therefore costs.

Processors

Under processors, we specify the following processors:

resourcedetection processor, which can be used to detect resource information from the host, in a format that conforms to the OpenTelemetry resource semantic conventions, and append or override the resource value in telemetry data with this information.
filter, which cleans up unnecessary metrics dimensions.
transform, which optimizes the visualizations in Infrastructure & Operations.

Exporters

Under exporters, we specify the otlp_http exporter and configure it with our Dynatrace API URL and the required authentication token.

For this purpose, we set the following two environment variables and reference them in the configuration values for endpoint and Authorization.

DT_ENDPOINT contains the base URL of the Dynatrace API endpoint (for example, https://{your-environment-id}.live.dynatrace.com/api/v2/otlp).
DT_API_TOKEN contains the API token.

How-to

Monitor your hosts

Once you've set up your Collectors and the Host Monitoring extension, use Infrastructure & Operations to monitor your OpenTelemetry ingest. Go to Infrastructure & Operations > Technologies and select the OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring extension.

Topology

This extension automatically generates topology for infrastructure monitored via the OpenTelemetry Collector. Specifically, it creates the following entity types based on metadata extracted from metrics, logs, and traces:

Entity type	Entity ID
OpenTelemetry Host	dt.entity.otel:host
OpenTelemetry Process	dt.entity.otel:process

These entities enable Dynatrace to correlate your metrics, logs, and spans and provide unified context across your monitored environment.

Enrich application telemetry

If you send your application telemetry to your local host OpenTelemetry Collector, it will automatically enrich the data with the required host attributes so that the signals are correctly attached to the OpenTelemetry host entity.

To enrich application telemetry with the corresponding process entity, all signals (metrics, logs, and spans) need to have the process.executable.name resource attribute. For logs and spans to have this attribute, you need to initialize your OTel SDK with the process resource detector.

If this is not implemented for your technology's OTel SDK, you can always set the process.executable.name attribute through the OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES environment variable.

Set up alerts

The OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring extension provides alert templates that you can use to create alerts based on the imported data. For example, you can use alerts to get notifications when a metric crosses a fixed value. Alerts can learn from historical data to detect unusual behavior, and account for recurring patterns such as daily or weekly cycles.

Dynatrace provides alerts with pre-configured thresholds that you can use as-is or customize to meet your requirements.

To use these templates and set up alerts:

Go to Extensions > OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring > Extension content.
Find any alert template that you're interested in and select New Alert.
Configure the alert according to the available options.

For more information, see Introducing OpenTelemetry collector self-monitoring dashboards.

Limitations

The metric system.processes.created is only available on BSD and Linux operating systems.
The metric process.disk.io requires running the Collector with privileged access. If you don't do this, the metric will be prevented from being captured.