Get cost overview

  • 4min
  • Published Apr 15, 2025

If an increase in consumption is identified, administrators want to identify the key contributors of increased costs to take appropriate remediation steps. Account Management supports this in two ways:

  • It helps you identify which environment is the primary contributor to costs (using the environment summary table and the capability cost and usage analysis sheet) and which capability is the primary contributor (using the cost and usage details summary and environment cost and usage analysis sheet).
  • It provides you with links to drill-down to environment-level usage details in the platform.

For Grail-powered capabilities in Dynatrace SaaS deployments, you get access to pre-configured DQL statements (including contextual navigation) that can be used in Notebooks for detailed analysis of Grail-based usage.

contextual navigation to a Notebook

The following capabilities provide context-aware links to Notebooks, allowing you to analyze usage in more detail:

  • Log Management and Analytics – Retain
  • Log Management and Analytics – Query
  • Events - Ingest & Process
  • Events – Retain
  • Events – Query
  • Metrics - Ingest & Process
  • Traces – Query
  • Automation Workflows
  • AppEngine Functions – Small

Classic Dynatrace consumption capabilities, which previously supported consumption of Davis Data Unit (DDU) SKUs for Custom Events Classic, Custom Metrics Classic, Custom Traces Classic, Serverless Functions Classic, and Log Monitoring Classic, can be analyzed directly in the Account Management web UI and further with context-aware links to the Data Explorer.

Other capabilities support context-aware links to the Data Explorer, providing you with comprehensive reporting capabilities to analyze your Dynatrace platform usage.

To illustrate how this works together, the following example shows increased usage in the Custom Metrics Classic capability, which causes the Dynatrace Platform Subscription forecast to increase unexpectedly:

  • The subscription in this example starts on March 01, 2023, and has a USD 2 million commitment over a year.
  • On May 25, 2023, a cost monitor detected a variance in the forecast, showing a week-over-week increase of 14%, increasing the forecast to 110% of the commitment amount. The forecast predicts that the commitment level will exceed USD 2 million on January 20, 2024.

week-over-week increase of 14%

  • DPS cost monitors are automatically set up to notify license administrators if the forecast exceeds 100% or when a week-over-week variance greater than 10% is detected. An email with the following information is generated and sent to all license administrators who, upon selecting the link, are directed to Account Management for further analysis.

notify license administrators if the forecast exceeds 100%

  • A cost monitor also detected an increase in Custom Metrics Classic in the Production environment, providing the starting point to determine what caused the increase.

increase in Custom Metrics Classic

  • The user selects the View Details link of the Cost event to start their analysis. This opens an analysis sheet filtered down to their environment and the Custom Metric Classic capability, identifying an apparent increase on the date identified in the cost events.

apparent increase in the Custom Metric Classic capability

  • The license administrator needs to determine whether a new metric was added or if there is an increase in an existing metric.

  • Account Management provides built-in analysis capabilities for Custom Events Classic, Custom Metrics Classic, Custom Traces Classic, Serverless Functions Classic, and Log Monitoring Classic. You can scroll down to see a list of metrics that contribute to the overall usage of this capability.

  • The table displays each metric, its current usage (based on the timeframe selected in the above chart), the use for the prior period, and the change in usage from the past to the current period.

  • Selecting the row headers allows you to find the metric that is either consuming the most or has changed the most. In the case below, there is a significant increase in two AWS metrics.

metric that is either consuming the most or has changed the most

  • You can chart any usage metric over the same period to understand when it increased and by how much. The action menu offers one-click contextual navigation to the Data Explorer in the Dynatrace platform if additional analysis is needed.

one-click contextual navigation

  • Account Management provides contextual navigation to analyze usage in the Data Explorer.

  • The Open details with Data Explorer link opens the related metric, allowing you to perform additional analysis within the Dynatrace platform.

additional analysis