Calculate your consumption of Foundation & Discovery (DPS)
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- Explanation
- 1-min read
Dynatrace OneAgent can be configured for Foundation & Discovery mode, which provides basic monitoring for your hosts (for example, host health, disk status, and OS service status). Unlike other tools that provide basic monitoring, Foundation & Discovery leverages core OneAgent features: discovery and topology.
Foundation & Discovery mode detects process-to-process communication and populates the Smartscape topology accordingly. This provides important clues for AIOps which is included with OneAgent, see Davis® AI automatic root cause analysis for details.
Broad deployment of Foundation & Discovery mode enables you to select the right monitoring mode for each of your hosts. A host’s criticality can be determined based on which processes, technologies, externally accessible services, and topological connections.
OneAgent in all modes also includes automated log ingestion, which consumes Log Management and Analytics.
Host hours
The unit of measure for calculating consumption of host monitoring in Foundation & Discovery mode is a host hour. Each instance of Dynatrace OneAgent installed and running on an operating system instance (deployed on either a physical or virtual machine) with Foundation & Discovery mode enabled consumes host hours. The longer that a host is monitored, the more host hours are consumed. Consumption is independent from a host's memory size.
While Foundation & Discovery and Infrastructure Monitoring both use host hours as their unit of measure for calculating monitoring consumption, Foundation & Discovery has a lower cost per host hour, reflecting its limited capabilities. For details on Dynatrace pricing, see your rate card, or speak to your Dynatrace account manager.
Billing granularity for host-hour consumption
Dynatrace is built for elastic cloud-native environments where hosts and services are rapidly spun up and destroyed. Therefore, billing granularity for host-hour consumption is based on 15-minute intervals. When a host is monitored for fewer than 15 minutes in an interval, host-hour consumption is rounded up to 15 minutes before consumption is calculated.
The image below illustrates how host-hour consumption per host, calculated at 15-minute intervals.
Metrics
Foundation & Discovery includes basic built-in metrics. Unlike Full-Stack and Infrastructure Monitoring, Foundation & Discovery doesn’t offer included custom metrics. For more information, see Infrastructure and Discovery monitoring modes.
Consumption details: Foundation & Discovery
Dynatrace provides built-in usage metrics that help you understand and analyze your organization's consumption of Foundation & Discovery.
To use these metrics, in 
Data Explorer, enter DPS in the Search field.
These metrics are also available via the Environment API and your Account Management portal (Usage summary > Foundation & Discovery > Actions > View details).
- (DPS) Foundation & Discovery billing usage
Key:
builtin:billing.foundation_and_discovery.usageDimension: count
Resolution: 15 min
Description: Total number of host hours in Foundation & Discovery mode, counted in 15 min intervals.
- (DPS) Foundation & Discovery billing usage per host
Key:
builtin:billing.foundation_and_discovery.usage_per_hostDimension:
dt.entity.hostResolution: 15 min
Description: Host hours per host in Foundation & Discovery mode, counted in 15 min intervals.
- (DPS) Ingested metric data points for Foundation & Discovery
Key:
builtin:billing.foundation_and_discovery.metric_data_points.ingestedDimension: count
Resolution: 15 min
Description: Number of metric data points aggregated over all Foundation & Discovery monitored hosts.
- (DPS) Ingested metric data points for Foundation & Discovery per host
Key:
builtin:billing.foundation_and_discovery.metric_data_points.ingested_by_hostDimension:
dt.entity.hostResolution: 15 min
Description: Number of metric data points split per Foundation & Discovery monitored host.