Initial setup for Android frontends

Latest Dynatrace
How-to guide
Published Jan 13, 2026

On this page, you will learn how to perform initial setup for Android frontends.

Enable the New RUM Experience for a mobile frontend

Go to Experience Vitals > Overview.
Select Mobile to view all mobile frontends.
Select the frontend you want to configure.
Navigate to the Settings tab.
Under Enablement and cost control, turn on New Real User Monitoring Experience.

Enable the New RUM Experience at the environment level

To enable the New RUM Experience for web frontends at the environment level:

Go to Settings > Collect and capture > Real User Monitoring > Mobile frontends > Traffic and cost control.
Turn on Enable New Real User Monitoring Experience.

Perform initial setup

1. Create a Dynatrace mobile application

Go to Experience Vitals.
Select Frontend in the upper-right corner.
Select the Mobile type of frontend.
Follow the steps in the Frontend creation wizard. When doing so, select Android from Native platforms.

2. Add OneAgent to your project

The instrumentation wizard guides you through each step required to integrate OneAgent into your Android project. Follow the wizard steps carefully—each step includes code snippets with your application's configuration values that you can copy directly into your project.

The wizard covers:

Adding the Dynatrace Android Gradle plugin to your build script.
Configuring the plugin with your application ID and beacon URL.
Setting up user opt-in for data privacy compliance.

Dynatrace Android Gradle plugin

For detailed configuration options and advanced use cases beyond the wizard.

Manual instrumentation

Only for rare cases where the Gradle plugin can't be used due to technical limitations.

3. Build and run

Build and run your application to complete the setup.

Build your project in Android Studio (Build > Make Project).
Run the application on a device or emulator.

Verify your installation

After installing and configuring OneAgent, verify that data is being collected.

Open your app and perform several actions (navigate between screens, tap buttons, and make network requests).

With the Dynatrace Android Gradle plugin, events are captured automatically. If you used manual instrumentation, you need to instrument these interactions yourself before data appears.

Go to your mobile frontend in Dynatrace:
1. Go to Experience Vitals > Overview.
2. Select Mobile to view all mobile frontends.
3. Select the frontend you want to configure.
Verify that your data appears in the Active users & sessions view.

This data can also be analyzed directly in Grail using DQL.

It may take a few minutes for data to appear in Dynatrace after the first app launch.

Next steps

After completing the initial setup, you can customize the instrumentation process:

Configure plugin for instrumentation processes—adjust variant-specific configurations, exclude classes and methods, and fine-tune the auto-instrumentation behavior.