Service detection
- Latest Dynatrace
- Explanation
- 1-min read
A service in Dynatrace represents a logical grouping of workloads—typically, applications or microservices running in your environment. Service detection automatically identifies these services and encompasses endpoint detection, failure detection, and splitting.
Dynatrace offers two service detection approaches:
- Service Detection v2 (SDv2)
- Service Detection v1 (SDv1)
Service Detection v2
Service Detection v2 operates according to a single set of attribute-based rules—built-in and user-defined—evaluated against every span of a trace.
As of October 2025, Service Detection v2 is GA for OpenTelemetry and in Public Preview for OneAgent Java in Kubernetes (SaaS only). Refer to the SDv2 Community Feedback Channel for frequent updates.
Service Detection v1
Service Detection v1 is the classic service detection for OneAgent-instrumented processes. It provides detection based on technology-specific service types.
Comparison of Service Detection v2 and v1
As shown in the diagram above, Service Detection v2 detects services using rules that evaluate resource attributes (like k8s.workload.name) against spans. Service Detection v1 detects services based on technology-specific span content (for example, invoked Java classes such as BillingController).