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OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring extension

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Monitor OpenTelemetry-instrumented hosts with auto-generated entity topology, metric visualizations, and alerts for faster infrastructure analysis.

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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.

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.

Requirements

This extension depends on telemetry data that is pushed to Dynatrace from OpenTelemetry via an OpenTelemetry Collector.

Activation and setup

  1. 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.

  2. Activate the OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring extension, see Deploy an extension from Dynatrace Hub.

Smartscape on Grail

Starting with version 3.0.3, the extension supports the new Smartscape on Grail and generates OTEL_HOST and OTEL_PROCESS smartscape nodes, as well as a runs_on static smartscape edge between the host and the process. The extension includes the processing pipeline to generate the entities based on the ingested OpenTelemetry data.

You still need to create the dynamic route manually for the data to flow through the pipeline.

To create the dynamic route

  1. Open Settings Settings and go to Process and contextualize > OpenPipeline.
  2. The extension enriches data from all metric, log, and span signals. Replicate the following configuration for all three signal types:
    1. Select the data source (Metrics, Logs or Spans).
    2. Go to Dynamic Routing and select Dynamic route.
    3. Enter a descriptive name for the route, for example, OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring.
    4. Add a matching condition. We recommend the following configurations for each signal type:
      • For metrics: matchesValue(metric.key, {"system.*", "process.*"}) AND isNotNull(host.id).
      • For logs: isNotNull(host.id) and isNotNull(host.name) and matchesValue(dt.openpipeline.source, "/api/v2/otlp/v1/logs").
      • For spans: isNotNull(host.id) and isNotNull(host.name) and matchesValue(telemetry.sdk.name, {"opentelemetry", "odin", "otel"}).
      • Even if you widen the matching condition, the pipeline's own rules still apply and filter the data at the processing step.
    5. Select the OpenTelemetry Host Monitoring pipeline from the dropdown. This pipeline will only appear if the extension is already installed.
    6. Select Add.
    7. Save your changes before leaving the OpenPipeline configuration screen.

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 adds Dynatrace-specific context to all signals (metrics, logs, and spans) for analysis and correlation.

For information on how to use the extension within Dynatrace, see Monitor hosts that send OpenTelemetry data to Dynatrace.

This extension does not include any feature sets. Users control what data the Collector sends to Dynatrace based on the Collector configuration.

Licensing and costs

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.created is currently available only on Linux and BSD operating systems.
  • The metric process.disk.io requires running the Collector with privileged access. Not doing so will prevent the metric from being captured.
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Monitor OpenTelemetry-instrumented hosts with auto-generated entity topology, metric visualizations, and alerts for faster infrastructure analysis.

Related tags
InfrastructureIntegrationOpentelemetryInfrastructure Observability