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Organize your data with primary Grail fields and tags

  • Latest Dynatrace
  • Explanation
  • 3-min read

This documentation describes the new tagging model for Latest Dynatrace. Some capabilities are still rolling out. If you're currently using Dynatrace Classic auto-tagging, see Dynatrace Classic versus Latest Dynatrace to understand how your existing setup maps to the new model.

Tags add the organizational context that turns telemetry into something teams can act on. In Dynatrace, a consistent tagging strategy lets you carry ownership, environment, application, and cost information across logs, metrics, spans, events, and Smartscape nodes, so the same metadata is available in both telemetry and topology.

Overview

The challenge is making existing metadata consistently available across every signal type in Dynatrace. This is possible with Primary Grail fields and tags. Dynatrace automatically enriches logs, metrics, spans, events, and problems, as well as Smartscape nodes, with the same metadata before data enters the processing pipeline. This means the same fields are available for routing data to the right pipeline, assigning Grail buckets, enforcing access control, allocating costs, and filtering dashboards and alerts. You don't need to rebuild your organizational vocabulary inside Dynatrace; Dynatrace picks up the tags you already maintain and makes them work across your entire observability setup.

Use cases

Teams use tags in Dynatrace to solve a small set of high-value problems repeatedly across environments and signal types.

  • Route telemetry into the right buckets based on environment, team, or business context.
  • Enforce access policies so teams only see the telemetry that they own.
  • Filter dashboards, notebooks, and segments to a specific application, environment, or business unit.
  • Scope alerting and workflow automation to the right owners and operational context.

Concepts

Plan your tagging strategy

Learn what tags are and why they matter.

Primary tags

Learn how primary Grail fields and tags form the metadata foundation of the Dynatrace platform.

Best practices

Follow a fallback approach to enriching your signals, from built-in defaults to ingest-time lookup.

Dynatrace Classic and Latest Dynatrace

Compare Dynatrace Classic auto-tagging with primary Grail fields and tags.

Migration

Use your Dynatrace Classic setup as input for primary Grail fields and tags.

Coming soon

Set up primary Grail fields and tags

OneAgent

Apply primary Grail fields and tags through OneAgent installation and runtime configuration.

Kubernetes

Promote Kubernetes labels and annotations to primary Grail fields and tags using the Dynatrace Operator.

Extensions

Enrich data from Dynatrace extensions with primary Grail fields and tags.

Coming soon

AWS

Propagate AWS resource tags to primary Grail fields and tags for unified observability.

Coming soon

Azure

Propagate Azure resource tags to primary Grail fields and tags for unified observability.

Coming soon

Google Cloud

Propagate Google Cloud labels to primary Grail fields and tags for unified observability.

Coming soon

Digital Experience

Apply tags in Real User Monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring for digital experience observability.

Coming soon

API

Set primary Grail tags programmatically using the Dynatrace API.

Coming soon

OpenTelemetry

Map OpenTelemetry resource attributes to primary Grail fields and tags.

Coming soon

Use OpenPipeline for ingest-time enrichment

If earlier-stage enrichment and central tag configuration don't cover your use case, use OpenPipeline primary Grail tag rules to derive primary Grail tags from existing record fields at ingest-processing time.

Related topics

  • Primary Grail fields and tags
  • Best practices for enriching primary Grail fields and tags
  • Differences between classic auto-tagging and primary Grail tags
  • Enrich Kubernetes telemetry with primary Grail fields and tags
  • Enrich OneAgent telemetry with primary Grail fields and tags
  • Plan your tagging strategy
Related tags
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