When ingesting OpenTelemetry metrics, the following rules and details apply.
Dynatrace maps the individual OpenTelemetry instruments to the following Dynatrace metric types:
| Instrument | with temporality | maps to Dynatrace |
|---|---|---|
| Counter | Delta | Counter |
| Counter | Cumulative | N/A |
| Gauge | N/A | Gauge |
| Explicit bucket histogram | Delta | Histogram |
| Exponential Histogram 1 | Delta | Exponential Histogram |
| UpDownCounter | Delta | Counter |
| UpDownCounter | Cumulative | Gauge |
| Summary | N/A | N/A |
For Exponential Histogram, Dynatrace ingests the histogram's min|max|sum|count but doesn't ingest the buckets.
Histograms are supported starting Dynatrace version 1.300.
OpenTelemetry supports attributes on different levels in an OpenTelemetry metric request (that is, data points, scopes, and resources). Because attributes are saved in a flattened fashion on the Dynatrace side, there may be name collisions if attributes on different levels share the same name.
To handle such name conflicts, Dynatrace applies the following order of priority to choose which attribute will be ingested:
For example, if there is a data point and a scope attribute with the same name, the value of the data point will take precedence. Similarly, if a scope and resource attribute share the same name, Dynatrace will ingest the value of the scope attribute.