DDUs for Business events

This page explains the concept of business events, how we calculate DDUs for business events, and how you can estimate and track DDU consumption if you use business events.

What are Business events?

Business Events/Analytics is a precise tool for ingesting, exploring, and analyzing your critical business data.

  • It ensures full accuracy of your analyses, as all events are captured without sampling, on a real-time basis, and from multiple sources.
  • It allows you to collect business events and transform them according to your needs using pipeline and DQL capabilities so that you can create the visualizations, charts, dashboards, and metrics needed to make business decisions. Creating metrics, which consumes DDUs according to custom metrics calculation, enables you to interpret and analyze your log data, as well as understand user impact.

How is DDU consumption calculated?

Apart from the DDU-based calculation, Log, and Events powered by Grail also consider the volume of data used, measured in gigabytes (GB). For example, searching through 1 TB of retained data during a DQL-query execution consumes 1,850 DDUs.

This model replaces the current approach of charging per log event used in Log Monitoring. It makes it possible to manage your logs and events at scale, particularly in cloud environments.

There are three pillars of billing. You can choose one, two or three (or any combination) of the pillars listed below:

  • Ingest and process
    Usage measured per gigabyte of data ingested and processed
  • Retain
    Usage measured per gigabyte of data stored per day
  • Query
    Usage measured per gigabyte of data searched through within the Grail database

Ingest and process

The data volume delivered via OneAgent or the Generic Log Ingestion APIs, is measured in gigabytes (GB). Every ingested and processed GB of data deducts 100 DDUs from your available quota.

To calculate your DDU consumption, multiply the total number of gigabytes ingested by the DDU weight, and by the time period measured in days.
For example, if the total amount of log data sent to Dynatrace was 60 GB per day:

  • The monthly DDU consumption for Ingest & Process is 180,000 DDUs (60 GB log data × 110 DDUs × 30 days)
  • The annual DDU consumption is 2,190,000 DDUs (60 GB × 110 DDUs × 365 days)

Retain

With Log and Events powered by Grail you can implement your data retention strategy depending on your business needs. Your data can be accessed at any time for ad-hoc DQL queries. Dynatrace determines your usage by measuring the daily gigabytes (GB) stored on Grail. For every gigabyte of data stored on Grail, 0.30 DDUs gets deducted from your quota.

For example, if you add 1,250 GB of data on a daily basis and decide to keep it for 35 days:

  • The monthly DDU consumption is 393,750 DDUs (1,250 GB × 35 retention days × 0.30 DDUs per day × 30 days)
  • The annual DDU consumption is 4,790,625 DDUs (1,250 GB × 35 retention days × 0.30 DDUs per day × 365 days).

In case you decide to store the data for a year:

  • The monthly DDU consumption is 4,106,250 DDUs (1,250 GB × 365 retention days × 0.30 DDUs per day × 30 days)
  • The annual DDU consumption is 49,959,375 DDUs per year (1,250 GB × 365 retention days × 0.30 DDUs per day × 365 days).

Query

Queries written in the Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) allow you to explore and analyze your data. Dynatrace determines your usage by measuring how many gigabytes of data were searched within the Grail database during the query execution. For every gigabyte of data searched using the DQL query, 1.70 DDUs gets deducted from your quota.

For example, if you execute DQL queries that search through an average of 12 TB of data stored in Grail per day:

  • The monthly DDU consumption is 612,000 DDUs (12,000 GB × 1.70 DDUs × 30 days),
  • The annual DDU consumption is 7,446,000 DDUs (12,000 GB × 1.70 DDUs × 365 days).

Calculation summary table

Pillar name

Pillar definition

DDU weight

DDU daily usage calculation

Ingest and process

Amount of data sent to Dynatrace via OneAgent and/or API before processing takes place.

100 per GB

Total number of GB ingested X DDU weight

Retain

Amount of data sent to storage after data processing and before data compressing.

0.30 per GB per day

Total number of GB of data processed per day X number of retention days X DDU weight

Query

Amount of data searched during the execution of a DQL query. Includes sampled data.

1.70 per GB of data searched

Total number of GB of data searched during query execution per day X DDU weight

Frequently asked questions

Beginning with Dynatrace version 1.250+, the retention period can be set to 35 days, 1 year or 3 years on tenant level in SaaS.

To check your DDU consumption

  1. Go to Account Management > License / Subscription > Overview.

    You need the Manage monitoring settings permission or an admin account to access this page.

  2. On the Davis data units (DDU) page:

    • In the Consumption by DDU pool table, check the Log Monitoring row.
    • In the DDU consumption details section, check the Log Monitoring tab.

Logs and Events powered by Grail switch from the pure unit-based approach to a volume-based approach measured in gigabytes (GB). Therefore, DDU consumption is calculated as below:

  • 100 DDUs per 1 GB for data ingested and processed
  • 0.30 DDUs per 1 GB per day for data stored in Grail
  • 1.70 DDUs per 1 GB for data searched within the Grail database during query execution

In the Logs and Events powered by Grail, the DDU consumptions for a given period is calculated on data volumes ingested and processed, stored in Grail per day and searched within the Grail database) during query execution multiplied by the DDU weight. The number and the size of a single log record or business event is not relevant for DDU consumption for products enabled by Grail.

No. Log and Events powered by Grail always consumes DDUs for Ingest and Process, Data Storage (Retention) and DQL Queries, which are deducted from your available quota. You can choose only the Ingest and process data option, without storing it in Grail or querying it.

No. The new pricing model will only affect customer accounts and tenants after being activated for and connected to a Grail cluster for log and events data. The existing DDU capability types for custom metrics, log monitoring, custom traces, custom events and serverless functions remain unchanged unless you decide to migrate.

If you decide to use Log or Events powered by Grail, then the new volume-based pricing model will replace the existing event-based pricing model for Log monitoring. The existing DDU capability types remain unchanged.

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