Manage service health and performance
- Latest Dynatrace
- Tutorial
- 4-min read
The Explorer view in 
Services lets you monitor service health and performance, filter services by any dimension, and drill into individual services across your environment.
This tutorial covers navigating the Explorer view, filtering services by namespace, and investigating individual service details, including performance data, metrics, infrastructure dependencies, and logs.
Who is this for?
Platform engineers, SREs, and developers responsible for monitoring the health and performance of services.
What will you learn?
In this tutorial, you'll learn how to:
- Monitor service health and view service metadata using the Explorer view in Services
- Filter services
- Drill into an individual service to review its performance, metrics, infrastructure, and logs
Before you begin
Prerequisites
- Services instrumented with OneAgent or OpenTelemetry.
- Services is installed in your Dynatrace environment.
- You have the minimal set of permissions to use Services.
You can also follow along without any setup by using the Dynatrace Playground.
Prior knowledge
- Basic familiarity with service and other observability concepts.
Navigate the Explorer view
Follow the steps below to navigate the Explorer view, filter your services, and investigate individual service details.
1. Access the Explorer view
In Services in the Dynatrace Playground, go to Explorer to view all services along with their health and custom alerts, failure rates, response times, and throughput.
1. View health alerts
-
In the Type to filter field on top of the service list, enter "alert status" = Critical.
Alternatively, in the sidebar panel on the left, enter alert status in the Search facets field, and select Critical from the available statuses.
-
Select Update to display services with critical health alerts.
-
Select one of the health alerts to view additional details on the problem.
-
Hover over the problem details to display additional options. For example, you can view the metric or investigate the problem.
2. Filter by namespace
- In the Type to filter field on top of the service list, delete the previously added query.
- Enter k8s.namespace.name = astroshop and select Update to display services that relate to the astroshop Kubernetes namespace.
3. Select a service
Select the recommendation service to open the service details panel, which contains several tabs with detailed information about that service.
4. Review the Overview tab
- Examine the Overview tab of the recommendation service. This tab provides comprehensive charts that show the response time, throughput, and failure rate across all endpoints of the selected service. This information gives you a complete picture of how the service is performing.
- Scroll down to the Endpoints section, which lists all endpoints detected for the recommendation service, along with their response time, throughput, and failure rate.
5. Inspect service properties
Go to the Properties tab to view additional service properties, such as the Kubernetes cluster and namespace where the service is deployed, along with other deployment metadata.
6. Check metrics
Go to the Metrics tab to view custom metrics from various sources, like Spring Micrometer and OpenTelemetry. These non-standard metrics supplement the default performance data with application-specific information that is important to your service.
7. Examine infrastructure
Switch to the Infrastructure tab to view the infrastructure entities associated with the selected service, such as pods, processes, and hosts. Use this view to understand where the service is running and identify infrastructure dependencies.
8. Search logs
Go to the Logs tab to run log line queries and search for warnings, errors, or any log entries within the current timeframe. Use log entries to correlate performance issues with specific log messages.
Congratulations!
You've completed the tutorial. You now know how to:
- Navigate the Explorer view to monitor service health across your environment.
- Filter services by Kubernetes namespace to focus on what matters.
- Drill into a service to review its performance, endpoints, metrics, infrastructure, and logs.
To continue exploring, you can set up alerts on your services, create SLOs based on endpoint metrics, or investigate failures using failure analysis.
Services