Size Dynatrace ActiveGates in Kubernetes

• Latest Dynatrace
• How-to guide
• 5-min read
• Updated on Jul 15, 2026

Setting appropriate resource requests (and limits, when needed) keeps your ActiveGate instances stable and predictable. A stable, healthy ActiveGate ensures continuous gap‑free monitoring data.

This guide details sizing recommendations according to the deployment type, deployment size, and assumed workload.

Deployment recommendations

Use separate ActiveGates

We recommend to run two sets of ActiveGates for production deployments:

Using two sets of ActiveGates has several advantages:

How to scale ActiveGates

When traffic increases beyond the capacity of your current ActiveGate deployment, you can scale in two ways:

Sizing recommendations

The following sections cover the four main deployment types: Kubernetes Platform Monitoring, OneAgent traffic routing and proxying, OTLP log ingestion, and combined log ingestion and OneAgent traffic routing. Identify your deployment type and apply the corresponding recommendations.

For each deployment type, we've organized recommendations according to the following cluster sizes: small, medium, and large.

Kubernetes Platform Monitoring

This section provides sizing recommendations for the ActiveGate that handles Kubernetes Platform Monitoring, whether alone or in combination with Application Observability and Full-Stack Observability.

OneAgent traffic routing and proxying

This section provides sizing recommendations for an ActiveGate that handles OneAgent traffic routing and proxying. If this ActiveGate should also handle log ingest via API, see Combined log ingestion and OneAgent traffic routing.

The sizing recommendations are based on representative workload testing:

OTLP log ingestion

This section provides sizing recommendations and throughput benchmarks for ActiveGates that handle log ingestion via the OTLP API endpoint.

The sizing recommendations are based on representative workload testing:

These resource configurations provide headroom for traffic spikes and replica failover during updates.

Combined log ingestion and OneAgent traffic routing

This section provides sizing recommendations for an ActiveGate that handles both log ingestion and OneAgent traffic routing in a unified deployment. If your ActiveGate does not have any log ingestion via API, see OneAgent traffic routing and proxying.

As an example, if your cluster generates 1,500 MB/min of OTLP log traffic and you're using the medium resource config (650 MB/min per replica): ceil(1,500 ÷ 650) = 3 additional replicas.

Log Agent traffic routing capacity benchmarks

This section provides a reference benchmark for ActiveGate throughput when handling Log Agent traffic routing. The throughput values shown represent compressed log data volume and reflect the recommended operating maximum under sustained conditions.

How to use this benchmark:

Monitor and validate

Monitor your ActiveGate instances to ensure load is distributed appropriately and adjust your scaling strategy based on observed performance and resource utilization patterns.

This section describes how to monitor your ActiveGates and verify they're behaving as expected.

Signs of an unhealthy ActiveGate

These symptoms indicate exhausted resources and potential data loss:

Observe health with platform metrics

Dynatrace provides two ready-made dashboards to help you observe your ActiveGate health: ActiveGate diagnostic overview and Kubernetes Monitoring Statistics. To access these, go to Dashboards > Ready-made and search for the dashboard by name.

Additionally, you can use DQL to query the following platform metrics and build your own dashboards or notebooks.

Factors that drive an increase in resource consumption

Actual required resources increase with:

Scrape Prometheus metrics

Dynatrace supports up to 1,000 pod exporters, with each exporter able to provide up to 1,000 metrics. If your environment approaches these limits, you'll need to increase the resources allocated to the ActiveGate to ensure reliable performance.

For high-volume Prometheus scraping, and for new deployments, we recommend the OpenTelemetry Collector.

Example DynaKube resources

This section provides an example manifest that includes two DynaKube resources that you can use to configure your ActiveGates.

It follows the deployment recommendation to use two sets of ActiveGates: one for Kubernetes Platform Monitoring, and one for OneAgent traffic routing and telemetry ingest. You can apply one or both manifests according to your deployment.

apiVersion: dynatrace.com/v1beta5
kind: DynaKube
metadata:
  name: k8s-monitoring
  namespace: dynatrace
spec:
  apiUrl: https://ENVIRONMENTID.live.dynatrace.com/api
  tokens: <SECRET NAME>
  # Link to api reference for further information: https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/ingest-from/setup-on-k8s/reference/dynakube-parameters
  activeGate:
    capabilities:
      - kubernetes-monitoring
    resources:
      requests:
        cpu: 1000m
        memory: 10Gi
      limits:
        # cpu: 2000m
        memory: 10Gi
  #kspm:
    #mappedHostPaths:
      #- /boot
      #- /etc
      #- /proc/sys/kernel
      #- /sys/fs
      #- /sys/kernel/security/apparmor
      #- /usr/lib/systemd/system
      #- /var/lib
  #templates:
    #kspmNodeConfigurationCollector:
      #imageRef:
        #repository: public.ecr.aws/dynatrace/dynatrace-k8s-node-config-collector
        #tag: 1.5.2
---
apiVersion: dynatrace.com/v1beta5
kind: DynaKube
metadata:
  name: agents
  namespace: dynatrace
# Link to api reference for further information: https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/ingest-from/setup-on-k8s/reference/dynakube-parameters
spec:
  apiUrl: https://ENVIRONMENTID.live.dynatrace.com/api
  tokens: <SECRET NAME>
  metadataEnrichment:
    enabled: true
  oneAgent:
    applicationMonitoring: {}
  activeGate:
    capabilities:
      - routing
      - debugging
    resources:
      requests:
        cpu: 1000m
        memory: 6Gi
      limits:
        # cpu: 4000m
        memory: 6Gi
    replicas: 6
    #customProperties:
      #value: |
      #[otlp_ingest]
      #otlp_ingest_enabled = true
  #logMonitoring: {}
  #telemetryIngest:
    #protocols:
      #- jaeger
      #- otlp
      #- statsd
      #- zipkin
    #serviceName: telemetry-ingest
  templates:
    #logMonitoring:
      #imageRef:
        #repository: public.ecr.aws/dynatrace/dynatrace-logmodule
        #tag: <>
    #tolerations:
        #- effect: NoSchedule
        #  key: node-role.kubernetes.io/master
        #  operator: Exists
        #- effect: NoSchedule
        #  key: node-role.kubernetes.io/control-plane
        #  operator: Exists
    #otelCollector:
        #replicas: 1
        #imageRef:
          #repository: public.ecr.aws/dynatrace/dynatrace-otel-collector
          #tag: <tag>