Timedrift Monitoring extension
- Latest Dynatrace
- Extension
- Published Oct 27, 2025
Monitor your host's NTP/Chrony Time Offset.
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Overview
Track and visualize host time drift to ensure reliable synchronization across systems.
Timedrift extension measures time deviation on the host compared to the time source and reports time offset, which can be later used to alert on hosts going out of sync.
Use cases
Synchronize time across your network with Network Time Protocol (NTP), a critical component for distributed systems. Use Dynatrace to monitor host time offsets and visualize them directly on your dashboards.
Detect host time drift and track NTP synchronization failures in real time. If a host isn’t synced to an NTP server, manually configure one to maintain accuracy.
Extend monitoring to chrony-based hosts: Dynatrace automatically reads /etc/chrony.conf for pool or server entries and follows any specified confdir or sourcedir paths for comprehensive coverage.
Dynatrace won't synchronize time on your host but will measure the offset.
Requirements
Automatic configuration The reference servers, if available, are automatically obtained from the following sources:
- Linux:
/etc/ntp.confor/etc/chrony.conf - Windows: registry key
System\CurrentControlSet\Services\W32Time\Parametersunder valueNtpServer
Manual configuration If your host isn't synced with a time server, you can pass a list of servers to check the time against.
Details
Additional NTP requests
Because the extension makes its own NTP requests, you can expect an increased load on your time servers (once per minute per host by default). However, the absolute network overhead will likely be insignificant.
This is configurable between 1 and 15 minutes. If a less frequent check is configured, DAVIS RCA may not give the desired results.
Analyze data
The extension collects two metrics:
- NTP Time Offset, which is the time drift from the configured time server. Drift can be positive or negative, indicating that the host is ahead of or behind the time received from the NTP server.
- NTP Errors, which can be used to see if the host has any issues communicating with a time server. This metric is configurable to be captured or not.
Both metrics are automatically injected into the host details screen but can also be added to any data explorer chart or dashboard.
Feature sets
When activating your extension using monitoring configuration, you can limit monitoring to one of the feature sets. To work properly the extension has to collect at least one metric after the activation.
In highly segmented networks, feature sets can reflect the segments of your environment. Then, when you create a monitoring configuration, you can select a feature set and a corresponding ActiveGate group that can connect to this particular segment.
All metrics that aren't categorized into any feature set are considered to be the default and are always reported.
A metric inherits the feature set of a subgroup, which in turn inherits the feature set of a group. Also, the feature set defined on the metric level overrides the feature set defined on the subgroup level, which in turn overrides the feature set defined on the group level.
