About Dynatrace licenses, accounts, environments, and users

  • Latest Dynatrace
  • Explanation
  • 2-min read
  • Published Mar 16, 2026

This page describes how Dynatrace handles various administrative concepts, which are organized in hierarchical levels. These are, from the most general to the most specific:

  • License: One license can be used by one or more accounts.
  • Account: Each account can have one or more environments.
  • Environment: Each environment can be accessed by one or more users.
  • User: You log into a Dynatrace environment as a user.

The access to each of these layers is handled via permissions. Each Dynatrace user has specific permissions: some users may access only data within specific environments, while others may access account-level data.

Usage is calculated at the environment level. You can use Cost Allocation for more granular reporting within environments.

What is a Dynatrace license?

A Dynatrace Platform Subscription license lets your environment consume Dynatrace monitoring features.

In most cases, exactly one account (through its associated environments) consumes from a single subscription. With DPS for Hybrid, it's also possible in certain cases to have multiple accounts consume from a single subscription.

Account administrators can use Account Management to view information about licenses or subscriptions. For more information, see Subscription or license overview. Usage is continuously metered, and you can monitor consumption, forecast costs, and manage budgets across environments and accounts.

What is a Dynatrace account?

A Dynatrace account provides a single place to manage licenses and subscriptions, users, and SSO access.

An account can contain one or more environments, such as test, pre-prod, and production.

What is a Dynatrace environment?

A Dynatrace environment is how you interact with Dynatrace monitoring features.

  • You log into an environment.
  • Within the environment, you can view your monitoring data and alerts.
  • Queries are run against data that resides in the environment.

Each environment is identified by a unique ID, which you can find in both the Dynatrace UI and in the URL. For more information, see Environment ID. An example environment ID is abc12345.

In Dynatrace, usage is calculated at the environment level.

For more information about how an environment works technically, see What is a monitoring environment?.

What is a Dynatrace user?

You log into a Dynatrace environment as a Dynatrace user.

Permissions are granted to Dynatrace users. Permissions let users, for example, administer Dynatrace accounts, configure Dynatrace deployments, or query Grail data.

Permissions are granted at either the account level or the environment level. Account-level permissions apply to all environments in that account, while environment-level permissions apply only to that environment.

For more about permissions, see Identity and access management (IAM).

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