OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring extension
- Latest Dynatrace
- Extension
- Published Feb 20, 2026
Generate topology and screens for your OpenTelemetry host data for quicker display and easier analysis of the data.
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Overview
Monitor your hosts with OpenTelemetry using integrated metric visualizations, topology, and alerts. This extension automatically generates entities for hosts and their running processes, presenting telemetry data through intuitive interfaces designed for quick analysis. By correlating metrics, logs, and spans to host and process entities, you gain full context and a comprehensive view of your infrastructure.
Requirements
This extension depends on the telemetry data that is pushed to Dynatrace from OpenTelemetry, using the OpenTelemetry Collector.
Activation and setup
In order to use this extension, you need to:
- Deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector, following the instructions for the relevant deployment option.
- Activate this extension in Dynatrace environment to report on the metrics in context. This extension doesn't need an ActiveGate or a OneAgent.
Use cases
- Track performance, health, and availability of OpenTelemetry-monitored infrastructure.
- Analyze trends and baselines for capacity planning.
- Raise alerts on resource saturation, network errors, and other infrastructure issues.
- Get a dedicated, pre-configured view for infrastructure monitoring.
This extension uses telemetry data collected by the OpenTelemetry Collector. To monitor the health of your Collectors, see Collector self-monitoring.
Activation and setup
Deploy the OpenTelemetry Collector
- Follow the instructions on the OpenTelemetry Collector to deploy the Collector.
- Use the reference configuration.
- Ensure the Collector is running and telemetry data is reported to Dynatrace correctly.
Activate the OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring extension
Activate the OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring extension to enable topology, Unified Analysis screens, and alert templates.
Details
The OpenTelemetry Collector captures telemetry data from your infrastructure and pushes metrics to Dynatrace via the OTel API.
The extension displays telemetry data captured by the OpenTelemetry Collector and provides quick analysis and clear understanding of the data, adding Dynatrace-specific context to all signals (metrics, logs, and spans).
Topology
This extension automatically generates topology for infrastructure monitored via the OpenTelemetry Collector. Specifically, it creates the following entity types based on metadata extracted from metrics, logs, and traces:
| Entity type | Entity ID |
|---|---|
| OpenTelemetry Host | dt.entity.otel:host |
| OpenTelemetry Process | dt.entity.otel:process |
These entities enable Dynatrace to correlate your metrics, logs, and spans and provide unified context across your monitored environment.
Screens
The extension provides screens and dashboards that display entity information, metrics, and more. The data is displayed in a smart and structured way for easier navigation and a clearer understanding of the insights.
To find a list of your OTel hosts and processes, go to 
Infrastructure & Operations > Technologies.
Alert templates
This extension provides alert templates that you can use to create alerts based on the imported data. To use these templates and set up alerts:
- Go to
Extensions > OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring > Extension content. - Find any alert template you're interested in and select New Alert.
- Configure the alert according to the available options.
Licensing and cost
All ingested OpenTelemetry data (logs, metrics, and spans) is charged according to your rate card, see Dynatrace Platform Subscription or Dynatrace classic licensing.
The use of this extension does not itself incur any additional costs.
Based on our measurements using the reference configuration, we estimate the following metrics ingest volume:
- Approximately 4400 metric data points per host per hour.
- Approximately 400 datapoints per process per hour.
Both these numbers will vary depending on the available metrics. For more details, see Limitations.
Limitations
- The metric
system.processes.createdis currently available only on Linux and BSD operating systems. - The metric
process.disk.iorequires running the Collector with privileged access. Not doing so will prevent the metric from being captured.
Feature sets
This extension does not include any feature sets. Users are in control of what data will be sent to Dynatrace based on the Collector configuration.
