Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) gives you a single pool of capacity that every capability draws from according to your usage. You pay for what you use, shift consumption between use cases as priorities change, and adopt new capabilities without renegotiating your contract.
That same flexibility is what makes cost management a discipline at scale. Consumption is generated continuously by the configuration of your environments (a retention setting, an OpenPipeline rule, a dashboard's auto-refresh interval, a workflow's query), and each is an ongoing financial commitment made by the engineer who configured it. Across hundreds of engineers and dozens of environments, the bill becomes hard to read, harder to attribute, and easy to overshoot.
Cost management for DPS spans five disciplines that build on each other: see what's running, attribute it to the teams driving it, control it with budgets and monitors, predict where it's headed, and optimize what you're already paying for. Each discipline closes a feedback loop, from visibility through accountability to optimization.
Use the five steps below to keep those commitments visible, attribute them to their owners, and tune them deliberately.
View your costs in Account Management or export them via the cost API. For more information, see View.
Tag consumption with cost centers and products so every line item has an owner. For more information, see Allocate.
Set budgets aligned to your commitment and cost monitors that catch anomalies, then trace fired alerts back to the source.
For information about how to do this, see Control.
Read the built-in forecast, project run rate from your consumption history with DQL, and estimate new workloads before they land in your bill.
For information about how to do this, see Predict.
Apply best practices to reduce inefficiencies in the cost drivers you've identified.
For information about how to do this, see Optimize.
| Terminology | What it means |
|---|---|
DPS | Dynatrace Platform Subscription |
Subscription period | One year of your agreement (multi-year deals have multiple periods) |
Annual commitment | Your agreed minimum spend per year (for example, $500,000/year) |
Capability | The individual items on your rate-card (e.g. Full-Stack Monitoring) |
Rate card | The price list defining cost per unit for each capability |
Consumption units | Defined units a capability is measured by (e.g. GiB) |
Unit price | Price point for each capability on the rate card (for example, $1,000 per per 100,000 memory-GiB-hours) |
Price point | Price per unit for each capability (for example, $0.20 per GiB for log ingest) |
Unit of measure | Defined unit that raw metered units will be divided by (e.g. per 10,000 GiB) |
Usage | RAW metered units used for specific capabilities |
Cost | Monetary value: Usage / Unit of meassure * Price point |
On-demand | If you exceed your commitment, you continue using Dynatrace - no penalties or premium pricing |
Account Management | Admin Tool with visibility into Budget, Costs, Usage - per Account, Environment, Capability |
| DPS terminology | Budget concept | Alignment |
|---|---|---|
Annual commitment | Annual budget | Your committed spend is your budget baseline |
On-demand | Budget overage | Usage beyond commitment is overage that you need to manage |
Subscription period | Fiscal year | Align subscription periods with fiscal year, if possible |