Carbon Impact

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Dynatrace Carbon Impact enables you to calculate and monitor your IT carbon footprint. It tracks, reports, and helps you reduce the carbon emissions resulting from your cloud and on-premises infrastructure electricity consumption.

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Track and reduce your site infrastructure's carbon footprint.

Carbon Impact capabilities

Prerequisites

The following are the Dynatrace prerequisites for Carbon Impact.

Install Carbon Impact

To set up Carbon Impact

Data storage and retention

Carbon Impact calculates consumption data every hour, based on infrastructure monitoring metrics.

Data units

The units of data generated are as follows.

Methodology to estimate electricity consumption

Electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emission are calculated based on guidelines from the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA) with some contributions from the Cloud Carbon Footprint project and internal research from Dynatrace. All of the methodology is aligned with the GHG Protocol.

Energy is estimated based on the utilization metrics captured by Dynatrace OneAgent (in all modes for hosts) for CPU, memory, storage IO, and network. This estimation is performed every hour for each instrumented host through an automation.

The formula to estimate energy draw includes several parameters from external data sources and some assumptions.

External data sources

Assumptions for electricity consumption

Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)

The final result of the formula includes the energy consumed by hardware and cooling. Cooling is included in a standard metric, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE—not displayed directly in Carbon Impact but available in the raw data generated). This metric, used to measure the energy efficiency of a data center, is a ratio between the total power consumption of a data center—including cooling, lighting, and support equipment energy use—and the power consumed by the IT infrastructure. It describes how much energy IT equipment uses compared to other electrical devices.

The Power Usage Effectiveness varies depending on a data center, but its predefined values for the main cloud providers are publicly available. The ones used in the calculation are:

Carbon emissions calculation

Carbon emissions are estimated in CO2 equivalent grams. The calculation is multiplying carbon intensity factors by total energy consumed calculated with previous methodology.

Assumptions for carbon emissions

Carbon intensity data sources

The Carbon Impact landing page

The Carbon Impact landing page (Carbon Impact tab) provides an at-a-glance view of your IT carbon footprint.

Data centers and hosts

Data center emissions on the landing page shows energy and CO2e consumption per data center. Select a data center name to view details of its hosts.

The Hosts tab details energy and CO2e consumption per host. You can narrow your search using filters. For example, you can view underutilized hosts in a specific data center or top CO2e emitters.

Expand a hostname to see key infrastructure metrics: CPU in use, memory in use, and network traffic. Select a hostname to view the host details page.

Carbon Impact is automatically connected to Dynatrace Smartscape® topology modeling, so it’s easy to see the host details or use Notebooks for ad hoc analysis with DQL.

Advanced Analytics with Notebooks

You can use Notebooks to analyze your carbon footprint data.

Example 1

Get all the business events from your OneAgent-monitored environment. The results of this query display a list of metrics repored by OneAgent instances for the selected timeframe in your Notebooks query.

fetch bizevents
 | filter contains (event.provider, "dynatrace.biz.carbon")
 | filter contains (event.type, "carbon.measurement")

The event.type == “carbon.report” is no longer supported after version 0.28.0. But old data can be explored blending new and old event.types, on an alternative query:

fetch bizevents
 | filter contains (event.provider, "dynatrace.biz.carbon")
 | filter in(event.type,"carbon.report", "carbon.measurement")

Example 2

Get the energy and CO2 consumption per host.

fetch bizevents
| filter contains (event.provider, "dynatrace.biz.carbon")
| filter contains (event.type, "carbon.measurement")
| summarize totalEnergy = sum(energy.measurement.computing), totalCO2e = sum(carbon.emissions), by:dt.entity.host

The attributes emissions and totalElectricConsumption are deprecated from the data model since version 0.28.0. In case, the query wants to make calculations with old and new scheme there is this alternative query:

fetch bizevents
| filter contains (event.provider, "dynatrace.biz.carbon")
| filter contains (event.type, "carbon.measurement")
| fieldsAdd energy.measurement.computing=if(isNotNull(totalElectricConsumption), totalElectricConsumption, else:energy.measurement.computing)
| fieldsAdd carbon.emissions=if(isNotNull(emissions), emissions, else:carbon.emissions)
| summarize totalEnergy = sum(energy.measurement.computing), totalCO2e = sum(carbon.emissions), by:dt.entity.host

The table below lists sample results of this query. totalCO2e is in grams and totalEnergy is in watt-hours.

Example 3

Get the emissions from the top ten hosts that are generating more CO2 eq in grams including the names of the hosts taking advantage of the lookup command.

fetch bizevents
| filter event.provider == "dynatrace.biz.carbon"
| filter contains (event.type, "carbon.measurement")
| fields dt.entity.host, carbon.emissions
| lookup sourceField:dt.entity.host, lookupField:id, prefix:"host.",[fetch dt.entity.host ]
| summarize totalEmissions = sum(carbon.emissions), by:{host.entity.name, dt.entity.host}
| sort (totalEmissions) desc
| limit 10

Shows results in a table view inside a Notebook.

Example 4

Distribute Carbon emissions by process group using CPU usage.

fetch dt.entity.process_group_instance
| fields entity.name, dt.entity.host=belongs_to[dt.entity.host],
  dt.entity.process_group= instance_of[dt.entity.process_group],
  dt.entity.process_group_instance = id
| lookup sourceField:dt.entity.host, lookupField:dt.entity.host, [fetch bizevents
  | filter event.type=="carbon.measurement"
  | summarize sum = sum(carbon.emissions), by:{dt.entity.host}], prefix:"carbon."
| lookup [timeseries ts=avg(dt.process.cpu.usage),
  by:{dt.entity.process_group_instance}
  | fields cpu_sum= arraySum(ts), dt.entity.process_group_instance],sourceField:dt.entity.process_group_instance,
  lookupField:dt.entity.process_group_instance
| fieldsAdd cpu_sum=lookup.cpu_sum
| fieldsRemove "lookup*"
| fieldsRename carbon_per_host=carbon.sum
| lookup [timeseries ts=avg(dt.process.cpu.usage),  by:{dt.entity.process_group_instance}
  | lookup [fetch dt.entity.process_group_instance], sourceField:dt.entity.process_group_instance, lookupField:id
  | fields ts, dt.entity.process_group_instance, dt.entity.host = lookup.belongs_to[dt.entity.host]
  | fieldsAdd cpusum = arraySum(ts)
  | summarize cpuHostSum = sum(cpusum), by:{dt.entity.host}],
  sourceField:dt.entity.host, lookupField:dt.entity.host
| fieldsAdd carbon_per_process = (cpu_sum/lookup.cpuHostSum) * carbon_per_host
| fields dt.entity.process_group, dt.entity.process_group_instance,
  dt.entity.host, carbon_per_process
| sort carbon_per_process desc

Query steps explained

Settings

Select the gear icon in the upper-right corner of the page to access the app Settings menu.

You can deactivate the energy and emission data generation from here.

Optimization options

The Settings page offers two optimization options.

Idling optimization—Enables you to detect hosts that are turned on and running but not actively used or performing tasks.

Sizing optimization—Enables you to detect hosts that are not idle but use fewer resources than initially planned. You can also make changes to their configuration.

In both cases, you need to set parameters that define a host as idle or underutilized. Default values are based on Google Cloud criteria.

You can adjust the values to your requirements.

Business health performance indicator

You can define a business health performance indicator of your choice, derived from any of your captured business events.

For example, your business health performance indicator could be the total revenue generated by all the orders completed in a purchase process that is captured as business events containing an attribute for the revenue value. This KPI is displayed compared to carbon emissions in the Carbon vs business KPI chart in the lower-right corner of the app landing page.

To set up a Business health performance indicator