View DPS consumption with ready-made usage dashboards
- Latest Dynatrace
- Explanation
- 8-min read
With Dynatrace ready-made dashboards, you can get an overview of your DPS consumption, identify consumption spikes, and see what's driving that consumption—all in one place. An overview dashboard lets you see your consumption across all DPS categories, while drill-down dashboards give extended insights into specific capabilities.
You can then use this information to optimize your consumption and work through a specific spike end to end.
Prerequisites
- The usage dashboards are ready-made dashboards: They ship with Dynatrace and can be used out-of-the-box for all environments on Latest Dynatrace. To get the dashboards, open Dynatrace and go to
Dashboards > Ready-made and search for the dashboard by name. - The presented data is taken from
dt.system.*, and includes billing usage events and query execution events. To see this information, your Dynatrace user needs thestorage:system:readpermission to see system events. For more information, see Identity and access management (IAM) and Data access.
Overview
The usage dashboards include an overview of all your DPS capabilities, drill-down dashboards for high-volume capabilities and capability categories, and a dashboard for agentic AI consumption. Together, they let you find the specific application, user, notebook, dashboard, host, frontend, monitor, or AI tool that's responsible for driving consumption. For details on each dashboard, see Usage dashboards.
The dashboards show real-time usage estimates so you can investigate and optimize as consumption happens. For information about how consumption translates to your billed costs, see Overview (Dynatrace Platform Subscription).
Use cases
- Check current consumption against your annual commitment, and see which capabilities trend up.
- Identify the category, capability, or cost center responsible for a spike.
- Find the specific application, user, or query driving scan volume, and get suggested fixes.
- Spot Full-Stack hosts that could move to a lighter monitoring mode.
- See how much consumption agentic AI generates, and which AI tools, callers, workflows, and users drive it.
- Find the frontends, synthetic monitors, host groups, or Kubernetes clusters that drive Real User Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring, or Application Security consumption.
Usage dashboards
The usage dashboards are:
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Usage - Overview: The entry point. It provides an overview of usage by rate-card capability and category, shows trends over time, and breaks down cost by cost center.
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Usage - Traces, Usage - Logs, and Usage - Full-Stack: Drill-down dashboards for the highest-volume capabilities. These give you more detailed insights into consumption of ingest, retain, and query, the top drivers of this consumption, and suggest optimizations.
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Usage - Real User Monitoring, Usage - Synthetic Monitoring, and Usage - Application Security: Drill-down dashboards for capability categories that combine several rate-card capabilities. They show the estimated cost share of each capability and the frontends, monitors, host groups, or Kubernetes clusters that drive consumption.
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Usage - Agentic AI: A cross-capability dashboard for agentic AI consumption. It brings together AI Units, Standard Function Calls, and query consumption triggered by agentic AI.
Usage - Overview dashboard
The Usage - Overview dashboard provides data in four ways: You can further filter the information by category, capability, cost center, and custom filters.
- Overview: Consumption ranked by category, shown as a percentage of total consumption. Use it to see, at a glance, which categories are driving the bulk of your consumption.
- Cost Center: Consumption broken down according to cost center. This uses the
dt.cost.costcenterattribute, and records without a cost center appear as unassigned. For information on attributing consumption to cost centers, see Set up Cost Allocation. - Trend: A stacked bar chart of category consumption over the selected timeframe. Use this to spot growth, spikes, and periodic patterns.
- Capabilities: A table of every metered capability with its Category, Usage, Unit, and Share of total. The Details column links to drill-down dashboards where relevant, and the Documentation column links to the capability's licensing documentation.
It also includes an Ask Dynatrace Assist panel with starter prompts to explore consumption in natural language. Open Dynatrace Assist and enter your question there. For more information, see Ask cost questions with Dynatrace Assist.
Usage - Traces
The Usage - Traces dashboard helps you to understand your Traces usage and find optimization opportunities. You can further filter the information by fields such as cost center, Dynatrace app, user, document ID (dashboard or notebook), and custom filters.
- Query: Billable query volume over time, both total volume as well as broken down by source, plus weekly query and active user counts. See the top applications by billable query volume.
- Dashboards and Notebooks with high usage: The top 25 documents by query volume, including usage change and trend. Use this to find frequently accessed dashboards and notebooks running expensive queries.
- Detailed query usage and optimization opportunities: Top 100 users by application and top 100 queries by billable volume. See specific queries that miss a DQL best practice and could be optimized to reduce scan volume.
- Storage overview: A per-bucket breakdown of included versus extended span retention.
Usage - Logs
The Usage - Logs dashboard helps you to understand your Logs usage and find optimization opportunities. You can further filter the information by fields such as cost center, Dynatrace app, user, document ID (dashboard or notebook), and custom filters.
- Query: Billable query volume over time, both total volume as well as broken down by source, plus weekly query and active user counts. See the top applications by billable query volume.
- Dashboards and Notebooks with high usage: The top 25 documents by query volume, including usage change and trend.
- Detailed query usage and optimization opportunities: Top 100 users by application and top 100 queries by billable volume. See specific queries that miss a DQL best practice and could be optimized to reduce scan volume.
- Ingest and Retention overview: Daily ingest volume, total retention, and a per-bucket breakdown of log ingest and query usage across buckets.
- Included queries usage overview: Your weekly query multiple and scanned bytes against quota, to help you keep query costs predictable and within your fair usage policy. The query multiple is equal to the Aggregate scanned-GiB volume / Volume of log data that is retained within the Included Queries timeframe, see Understand your quota.
- Logs adoption by use cases: Usage breakdowns for Log Analytics, Logs in Context, and Logs on Dashboards, showing how users are querying logs across different Dynatrace apps.
Usage - Metrics
The Usage - Metrics dashboard helps you view, allocate, and predict your metrics usage across the platform. The dashboard provides you with a granular breakout of a metric by source, down to the metric prefix key.
This will help you better:
- Spot metrics ingest spikes. Identify sudden increases in ingest activity and dive into the source.
- Drill-down to see which metrics are driving your ingest and costs. View top metrics by source/prefix, or by the Cost Allocation cost center/product.
- Optimize your metrics cost by identifying unnecessary metrics for ingest, using the Dynatrace Assist along with the Best practices for optimizing metrics cost guide.
Usage - Full-Stack
The Usage - Full-Stack dashboard helps you to understand your Full-Stack Monitoring usage and included volumes, and find optimization opportunities.
You can further filter the information by fields such as cost center, host group, primary fields, and custom filters.
- Overall trend: The number of GiB-hours that you're consuming, displayed over time.
- Distribution: GiB-hour consumption sorted by cost center, host group, Kubernetes clusters, and Grail primary fields.
- Metrics: The volume of included metrics (in data points) according to your Full-Stack consumption, see Full-Stack included metrics.
- Traces:
- Your trace capture rate, see Adaptive Traffic Management.
- Ingest volumes display included and extended ingest separately, see Included and extended trace retention.
- A list of which cost centers are driving trace ingest consumption.
- Retention: Buckets that contribute the most to data retention, with a per-bucket breakdown of included versus extended retention, including extended volume.
It also includes an Ask Dynatrace Assist panel with a starter prompt to explore consumption in natural language. Open Dynatrace Assist and enter your question there. For more information, see Ask cost questions with Dynatrace Assist.
Usage - Agentic AI
The Usage - Agentic AI dashboard helps you understand your agentic AI usage and find optimization opportunities across users, workflows, and caller types. A single agentic AI action can generate usage across three billing types: AI Units, Standard Function Calls, and query consumption. This dashboard brings them together in one view. For more information on how these billing types relate, see Agentic AppEngine overview (DPS).
- Overview: The cost distribution per billing unit, based on list prices, as a total and as a trend over time. The billing units are AI Units, Standard Function Calls, and Log, Events, and Traces queries.
- Usage by billing unit: The total, trend, and usage over time for AI Units, Standard Function Calls, and AI-generated query consumption (billed GiB). Query consumption is broken down by query type: Events - Query, Log Management & Analytics - Query, and Traces - Query.
- Details:
- AI Units usage per tool: AI Units consumption broken down by the AI tool that was invoked, for example
operator(the driver LLM) orchat. - AI Units usage per caller: AI Units consumption broken down by caller type:
api,mcp, orworkflows. - Workflows: The number of workflows using agentic AI and the number of agentic workflow executions.
- AI Units usage per tool: AI Units consumption broken down by the AI tool that was invoked, for example
- Top 20 users and workflows:
- Top 20 users - AI Units: AI Units consumption broken down per user and tool.
- Top 20 users - Query consumption: AI-generated query consumption broken down per user and query type, with billed GiB, query count, and average billed GiB per query.
- Top 20 workflows - AI Units: AI Units consumption broken down per workflow and user, with a link to each workflow and its number of executions.
It also includes an Ask Dynatrace Assist panel with a starter prompt to explore agentic AI consumption, predict further spend, and get optimization tips in natural language. Open Dynatrace Assist and enter your question there. For more information, see Ask cost questions with Dynatrace Assist.
Usage - Real User Monitoring
The Usage - Real User Monitoring dashboard helps you understand your Real User Monitoring usage and find optimization opportunities across frontends, sessions, session replays, and properties. You can further filter the information by frontend and custom filters. Its usage data is near real-time, with a delay of one hour. For official billing figures, see Account Management.
- Overview: The estimated cost distribution, based on list prices, across Real User Monitoring, Real User Monitoring with Session Replay, and Real User Monitoring Property, as a trend over time, shown as a percentage of the peak three-hour total, and as an overall share.
- Costs per frontend: Estimated cost over time by frontend type (web or mobile), cost share by device type, the top five frontends by cost, and a table of all frontends by cost.
- Real User Monitoring: Sessions by frontend (top five and other) over time and as a share, and a table of frontends by cost.
- Real User Monitoring with Session Replay: Replay sessions by frontend (top five and other) over time and as a share, and a table of frontends by cost.
- Real User Monitoring Property: Properties by frontend (top five and other) over time, the total estimated cost, and a table of frontends by cost.
The Δ 7d and Δ 28d columns in the frontend tables compare the most recent day's cost with the daily average of the previous 7 or 28 days.
In the frontend tables, select Open to go to 
Experience Vitals > Overview for that frontend.
To see how RUM data is queried or how extended retention is used, use the Digital Experience retain and query usage dashboard.
It also includes an Ask Dynatrace Assist panel with a starter prompt to find which frontend drives a session consumption spike and how to optimize it. Open Dynatrace Assist and enter your question there. For more information, see Ask cost questions with Dynatrace Assist.
Usage - Synthetic Monitoring
The Usage - Synthetic Monitoring dashboard helps you understand your Synthetic Monitoring usage and find the monitors that drive it. You can further filter the information by monitor group and custom filters. Its usage data is near real-time, with a delay of one hour. For official billing figures, see Account Management.
- Overview: The estimated cost distribution, based on list prices, across Browser Monitor or Clickpath, HTTP Monitor, and Third-Party Synthetic API Ingestion, as a trend over time, shown as a percentage of the peak three-hour total, and as an overall share.
- Browser Monitor or Clickpath: Synthetic actions for the top five monitor groups (with the rest grouped as Others) over time and as a share; the table lists individual browser monitors with their actions and share of total.
- HTTP Monitor: Synthetic requests for the top five monitor groups (with the rest grouped as Others) over time and as a share; the table lists individual HTTP monitors with their requests and share of total.
- Third-Party Synthetic API Ingestion: Ingested third-party synthetic results for the top five monitor groups (with the rest grouped as Others) over time and as a share; the table lists individual third-party monitors with their results and share of total.
The Δ 7d and Δ 28d columns in the monitor tables compare the most recent day's usage with the daily average of the previous 7 or 28 days.
In the monitor tables, select Open to go to 
Synthetic > Synthetic monitors for that monitor.
It also includes an Ask Dynatrace Assist panel with a starter prompt to find which monitor drives a Browser Monitor consumption spike and how to optimize it. Open Dynatrace Assist and enter your question there. For more information, see Ask cost questions with Dynatrace Assist.
Usage - Application Security
The Usage - Application Security dashboard helps you understand your Application Security usage and find optimization opportunities across Runtime Vulnerability Analytics (RVA), Runtime Application Protection (RAP), and Security Posture Management (SPM). You can further filter the information by cost center, host group, and custom filters.
- Overview: The estimated cost distribution, based on list prices, across Runtime Vulnerability Analytics, Runtime Application Protection, and Security Posture Management, as a trend over time, shown as a percentage of the peak hourly total, and as a share by capability.
- Application Security Distribution: Runtime Vulnerability Analytics and Runtime Application Protection consumption (in GiB-hours), broken down by host group, Kubernetes cluster, and cost center.
- Runtime Vulnerability Analytics: GiB-hour consumption over time by host group, and a table of the top 100 host groups with their number of hosts, GiB-hours, and share of total.
- Runtime Application Protection: GiB-hour consumption over time by host group, and a table of the top 100 host groups with their number of hosts, GiB-hours, and share of total.
- Security Posture Management: Kubernetes node-hour consumption over time by Kubernetes cluster, and a table of clusters with their node-hours, number of nodes, and share of total.
The Δ Trailing 7d and Δ Trailing 14d columns compare the most recent day's consumption with the daily average of the trailing 7 or 14 days.
Security Posture Management is billed per Kubernetes node, so its usage has no host group or cost center. It's counted as host group unknown and cost center unassigned, and only appears when your filters include these values. To find your top consumers, use the Kubernetes cluster names in the By K8s cluster table.
It also includes an Ask Dynatrace Assist panel with starter prompts, for example to find which hosts drive the most Application Security spend. Open Dynatrace Assist and enter your question there. For more information, see Ask cost questions with Dynatrace Assist.
Next steps
- To act on what these dashboards reveal, see Optimize.
- To work through a specific spike end to end, see Trace a cost spike to its root cause.