Using OpenTelemetry with Dynatrace

Overview
2-min read

Instrumentation

Instrumentation is the process of adding telemetry support to your applications and services. Depending on the environment, this can be achieved either by using pre-existing OpenTelemetry instrumentation—which is available for many popular services—or by instrumenting your application code yourself.

Use pre-existing instrumentation

Many services already come with built-in support for OpenTelemetry and you only need to enable them and configure the correct endpoints. You can check the OpenTelemetry instrumentation registry for pre-instrumented service plug-ins and modules.

See also Platform & Technology integrations for step-by-step guides.

Instrument your code

Language support

Before you start, see if the programming languages used by your application are supported by OpenTelemetry. You can find a list of available implementations in the OpenTelemetry documentation.

Code instrumentation extends the functionality of your application to record and publish relevant telemetry details.

Recommended If automatic instrumentation is supported for your technology stack, it is best to start with that.
If automatic instrumentation isn't supported or doesn't provide enough insight, you can also manually instrument your code. For tracing distributed services, pay particular attention to context propagation.

Dynatrace provides guided walkthroughs for the majority of currently supported languages, detailing for each language how to:

Integrate OpenTelemetry
Use different instrumentation methods
Record individual telemetry signals
Send data to Dynatrace

Send data to Dynatrace

To aggregate, analyze, monitor, and store your telemetry data, you need to send it to the Dynatrace backend.

You can use either one of the following OTLP export ingest endpoints or—if you only use tracing on the supported platforms—have OneAgent automatically detect and ingest OpenTelemetry traces instead.

OTLP ingest endpoint

Description

SaaS ingest API

The SaaS endpoint provides the easiest ingest option, as you only need to configure your application for a standard OTLP export and do not require other installed components or services.

Requires an access token for authentication and a secure connection using TLS
For hosts monitored by OneAgent, it requires manual data enrichment to ensure proper host-mapping

See Export to SaaS and ActiveGate for more details.

Collector

Export to the Collector if you want an intermediate service layer for data collection, protocol conversion, or central post-processing of your telemetry data. You can also use the Collector to send your data to more than one backend at the same time. It also supports automatic OneAgent enrichment.

See Dynatrace Collector and Collector use cases for more details.

ActiveGate

Central collection gateway to the Dynatrace backend, providing OTLP endpoints for OpenTelemetry data.

Requires an access token for authentication and a secure connection using TLS
For hosts monitored by OneAgent, it requires manual data enrichment to ensure proper host-mapping
With a single point of ingest, network traffic and management are simplified and centralized

See Export to SaaS and ActiveGate for more details.

OneAgent (traces-only)

This is a regular export and different from automatic OneAgent ingestion.

If you have OneAgent deployed, you can also export traces to its local-only endpoint. This provides a convenient ingest interface with automatic request enrichment, no need for explicit authentication, but has the following limitations:

Only works with localhost connections
Does not work with containerized setups
Only accepts traces (no metrics or logs for now)
Requires the EEC to be enabled

See Export to OneAgent for more details.