Services

• Overview
• 4min
• Updated on May 30, 2025

Services are an application's fundamental building blocks. From an observability standpoint, they provide application owners with critical metrics to monitor application health. By tracking response time, throughput, and failure rates, owners can quickly identify anomalies detected by Davis® AI.

Dynatrace offers both health monitoring and detailed analysis of services. Users can investigate traces, logs, and hotspots while also using Smartscape® technology to understand relationships between services and their underlying infrastructure, such as hosts or Kubernetes nodes.

Service monitoring

Dynatrace offers a comprehensive set of capabilities to address diverse observability use cases. These range from high-level monitoring dashboards to in-depth analysis tools supporting app owners and troubleshooting use cases. Users can leverage different interfaces based on their specific needs, whether monitoring service health, analyzing performance issues, or investigating complex system behaviors.

Services provides modern monitoring focused on health metrics. It includes context links to Log Analytics, Distributed Traces, and DQL Notebooks for deeper investigation and analysis.

Services Classic includes analysis capabilities such as hotspot detection, service flow visualization, and code-level profilingthat will be incorporated into Latest Dynatrace in future releases.

Service detection

Service detection in Dynatrace automatically detects services in your environment, names them appropriately, splits them into relevant sub-groups—such as Kubernetes clusters—identifies endpoints, and recognizes failures.

Dynatrace offers two approaches to service detection: service detection v1 (SDv1), which is used exclusively for OneAgent instrumented services, and service detection v2 (SDv2), which supports both existing OneAgent and OpenTelemetry in a more simplified and unified way.

Service detection v2 is built on the Grail platform and uses attributes from OneAgent or OpenTelemetry spans. It provides a single set of rules that apply to all services regardless of source, creating a more unified and consistent experience. Currently, SDv2 applies to OpenTelemetry services, formerly Unified Services.

Service detection v1 is designed explicitly for OneAgent and offers functionality based on requests, attributes, and metadata for different service types. It includes a set of terminology found only in the previous Dynatrace and distinguishes between many service typesthat are not applicable in SDv2.

Service monitoring vs process monitoring

A service is a logical application component that performs specific business functions and handles end-user requests. A process is an executable program running on a host or container that consumes system resources.

Service monitoring focuses on application performance from an end-user perspective. It tracks the following:

Process monitoring focuses on infrastructure resource utilization. It measures the following:

In Dynatrace, processes are organized into process groups, while services represent the logical application components. This dual approach provides visibility into both infrastructure and application performance in a connected context.