Cost monitors
Cost monitors help you manage your Dynatrace Platform Subscription budget and identify unexpected cost increases. They monitor your overall forecasted usage and warn you when usage changes significantly or forecasts exceed user-defined threshold amounts. They also monitor daily costs at the capability and environment levels, alerting you when costs exceed predicted levels.
Cost monitors are only available for Dynatrace Platform Subscriptions.
Cost monitors start executing 30 days after the subscription start date, at which time sufficient forecast data is available.
Budget monitoring
Dynatrace calculates a daily linear forecast of overall account cost and generates forecast events when:
- Forecast costs for the end of the annual commitment period exceed a user-defined limit (default limit is 100%).
Event message:[Date] Forecast costs [%] exceed the defined threshold of [%] - Forecast costs increase significantly from one week to the next. The user-defined week-over-week change limit is set to 10% by default. This setting is useful for identifying significant changes in week-over-week usage, even when the total forecast cost remains as predicted.
Event message:[Date] Forecast costs increased [%] week-over-week. Forecast costs at [total-forecast%]
The budget forecast event panel on the right-hand side displays up to three of the most recent forecast events.
Dynatrace only generates a forecast event if the current day's forecast exceeds the previous day's forecast. For example:
- Day 1 - Dynatrace detects that the forecast is 105% and the limit is 100%.
A forecast event is generated:
Forecast costs [105%] exceed the defined threshold of 100% - Day 2 - The forecast remains at 105%; because there's no increase, no forecast event is generated.
- Day 3 - The forecast drops to 101%. No forecast event is generated.
- Day 4 - The forecast increases to 102%. A forecast event is generated:
Forecast costs [102%] exceed the defined threshold of 100%
Select View all forecast events to view all forecast events in the Notification center. You can adjust the forecast thresholds on the Notification settings page, accessible from the Notification center (see the Notification center section below for more details).
Cost monitoring
Each day, Dynatrace analyzes costs for each capability in your environments and generates cost events when all the following conditions are true:
- The observed daily value exceeds the forecast upper range by $10 USD (uses the exchange rate determined by your DPS subscription currency).
- The cost increase is statistically relevant compared to previous cost data points. Relevance is determined by comparing the cost increase against the median cost from the past 14 days and calculating a relevance score. If the score is small, it will not raise a cost event.
A cost event generates a message with the format: [Date] Increase in [capability name] detected in environment [tenantID].
The Cost events panel displays the five most recent cost events.
Select View details on any cost event card to open the related Capability cost and usage analysis page. The capability, environment, and timeframe (+/- five days) are automatically filtered for the selected event.
Select View all forecast events to view the Notification center history of all forecast events.
Because cost events rely on cost data that is calculated daily, Dynatrace might not raise cost events until two days after the event occurs. Also note that cost monitors don't generate cost events for amounts less than 1 USD (or cost equivalent in your local currency).
Notification center
The Notification center provides a history of all forecast and cost events. See above for details on how to access the Notification center.
The table displays events detected during the current commitment period, with the newest events displayed in the table's top rows. The table includes:
- Date – When the event was detected; use the Timeframe filter to limit results based on date.
- Message – Event text generated by Dynatrace; use the Search filter to filter results based on specific text strings.
- Event type – Select to view events of type Forecast or Consumption.
- Levels – Select to view events by severity.
- Environments – Select an individual environment name to filter for events of a specific environment, or select Account to filter for events at the account level.
- Capability – Indicates the capability that the cost event relates to. Select a specific capability to filter the table, or select DPS Cost Total to view all forecast events.
Notifications via API and email
Cost monitors can notify you via API and email when forecast and cost events occur.
API documentation for forecast and cost events is available in Dynatrace Platform Subscription API documentation.
To manage email settings, select Notification settings in the Notifications Center. You need the View and manage account and billing information account permission to manage notification settings.
For forecast notification thresholds, you can adjust:
- Week-over-week threshold : get notified when there is a weekly jump in the forecast. This notification helps identify significant increases in account usage, even if the total forecast remains below target.
- Total forecast threshold : get notified when projected usage exceeds a user-defined value. The default is 100% to ensure you get the most from your Dynatrace Platform Subscription without exceeding your annual commitment.
For cost event notifications, there are no thresholds to manage. Dynatrace uses linear forecasting algorithms to determine an acceptable range of values, and cost events are triggered when observed values fall outside of this range. In this way, Dynatrace ensures that meaningful increases are detected and that you are notified without false alerts.
- All cost events are identified as Critical and trigger an email.
These settings control the distribution of forecast and cost event notifications:
- Send email to license administrators on this account notifies users that have the View and manage account and billing information account permission. This permission is typically used only for account managers.
- Send email to additional users on this account allows you to specify the email addresses of users that should receive forecast notifications. The email contains links to Account Management, so keep in mind that all notification recipients need the View account access permission.
Remember to save your changes when you finish setting up notifications.
Email notifications
Cost monitors generate email notifications for specified recipients when forecast and cost events occur in an account. By default, license administrators are notified of all forecast and cost events. License administrators can subsequently define a specific email distribution list for these notifications. This approach ensures that someone is notified about license events without any upfront configuration.
Cost monitor emails are sent from the email address no-reply@dynatrace.com.
Each email includes a list of the events that were detected on that day. If no events were detected, no email is sent.
Select View your account in the email to open the Notification Center page in Account Management.
