Cost & Carbon Optimization

Latest Dynatrace

Calculates your IT carbon footprint at the data center and host levels for multi hybrid-cloud infrastructure.
Calculates your IT cost based on public price list from cloud vendors for each region and at host level.
Translates utilization metrics—including CPU, memory, disk, and network I/O—into energy consumption in kWh and CO2 equivalents (CO2e).
Reports carbon dioxide emissions and price list costs in a single interface— Cost & Carbon Optimization landing page.
Identifies opportunities to reduce costs and carbon emissions.

Permissions

The following table describes the required permissions.

Permission

Description

state:app-states:delete

Is required to delete workflow execution metadata

app-engine:functions:run

Is required to run the Cost & Carbon Optimization data calculation and ingest

storage:events:write

Is required to store Cost & Carbon Optimization events in GRAIL

storage:entities:read

Is required to read entities from GRAIL

state:app-states:read

Is required to read configuration and workflow metadata from app-states

state:app-states:write

Is required to write configuration and workflow metadata to app-states

automation:workflows:read

Is required to read Cost & Carbon Optimization data ingest automation related data

automation:workflows:write

Is required to create/edit the Cost & Carbon Optimization data ingest automation

storage:bizevents:read

Is required to read Cost & Carbon Optimization events from GRAIL

storage:buckets:read

Is required to read system data from GRAIL

Grant permissions to Workflows

Check if Workflows has the required permissions to run automations: open Workflows, select Settings > Authorization settings in the upper-right corner, and ensure that the following settings are enabled.

app-engine:apps:run
app-engine:functions:run
app-settings:objects:read
automation:workflows:read
automation:workflows:write
environment-api:entities:read
iam:bindings:read
state:app-states:read
state:app-states:write
storage:bizevents:read
storage:buckets:read
storage:entities:read
storage:events:write
storage:metrics:read

For more information, see Manage user permissions with IAM policies and Workflow authorization settings.

Installation

Make sure the app is installed in your environment.

Carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption are calculated for hosts that are set up and monitored with OneAgent. Energy calculations are based on observed infrastructure metrics.

In Cost & Carbon Optimization, go to the Hosts tab.
Check that you have at least one host instrumented.

The data generation of carbon emissions must be active to allow generating public pricing cloud costs. You can activate it in the app's settings.
You need instrumented hosts with OneAgent and cloud vendor monitoring configured. The calculation of public price list costs requires the collection of metadata from a host as the cloud provider, cloud region, and the type of instance configured in the cloud vendor. This information is provided by configuring the cloud vendor monitoring for the hosts to be monitored with OneAgent. For more information, see Ingest data.
Enable External requests to the cloud vendors where the hosts are running to collect public price lists into Grail.

External requests enable outbound network connections from your Dynatrace environment to external services. They allow you to control access to public endpoints from the AppEngine with app functions and functions in Dashboards, Notebooks, and Automations.
1. Go to Settings and select General > Environment management, External Requests.
2. Select New host pattern.
3. Add the domain names.
4. Select Add.
This way you can granularly control the web services your functions can connect to.

You need to add the following domain names
- For AWS, add *.amazonaws.com
- For Azure, add azure.microsoft.com
- For Google Cloud, add cloudbilling.googleapis.com

Dynatrace Cost & Carbon Optimization Cost & Carbon Optimization enables you to calculate and monitor your IT public prices list cost and carbon footprint. It tracks, reports, and helps you optimize the costs from your cloud infrastructure and reduce your carbon emissions resulting from your cloud and on-premises infrastructure electricity consumption.

1 of 1Landing page for Cost & Carbon Optimization

Landing page

The Cost & Carbon Optimization Cost & Carbon Optimization tab provides an at-a-glance view of your IT carbon footprint.

The Carbon & Energy Footprint summary reports total CO2e emissions for the selected and preceding timeframes for quick interval-based comparisons.
Wasted energy summary is also reported with the selected and preceding timeframe.
Publicly listed cloud costs reports calculated cloud costs. Costs associated with the instrumented hosts are also displayed in the same format for the selected and preceding timeframes.

Optimization recommendations reports idle hosts and underutilized hosts with their cost and wasted energy measured.

To adjust thresholds influencing these calculations to your needs, select in the upper-right corner to open Settings.
The Accumulated carbon footprint over time chart shows the accumulated carbon footprint and energy consumption over time.
With the Carbon versus business KPI chart, you can compare carbon emissions over time with a business key performance indicator (KPI) of your choice, derived from any of your captured business events.
If cloud costs are calculated, two more charts display Accumulated cloud cost over time and Cloud cost versus business KPI defined.

Learning modules

Go through the following process to learn using Cost & Carbon Optimization Cost & Carbon Optimization:

01Set up Cost & Carbon Optimization

How-to guide
Install and set up Cost & Carbon Optimization.

02Advanced analytics with Notebooks

Reference
Use Notebooks to analyze your carbon footprint data.

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.

The deviation from the measured power cannot be reliably determined due to the large variety of devices in the market and lack of statistical analysis.

Random Access Memory energy usage data source
- How much power does memory use?
CPU architecture sources (TDP, core, thread count) used in calculations
- Intel Product Specifications
- AMD Processor Specifications
- CPUs not officially listed are manually added through research, and the sources vary
Storage energy usage
- United States Data Center Energy Usage Report—Energy Technologies Area
Networking energy usage
- Methodology—Cloud Carbon Footprint

CPU energy measurement:
- Over a long period of time, a CPU running at 100% utilization will consume its TDP in power draw.
- The base power draw of a CPU is 1/3 of its TDP It is known that true idle for CPUs is much lower, but CPU utilization hovers around a constant 10-20% for server applications, so true idle can never be reached.
- One cloud vCPU equals one CPU thread
Memory energy measurement:
- Random Access Memory uses a constant of 3 W of power per 8 GB regardless of utilization.
Storage energy measurement:
- The power draw of a terabye of SSD storage is 1.2 W
- All storage is assumed to be on an SSD
- Storage power draw is constant
- Cloud storage is replicated twice (or more)
Network energy measurement:
- 1 GB of networking (upload or download) consumes 1 W if sent outside of the local network.
- 1 GB of networking (upload or download) consumes 0.12 W if remaining within a local network.

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 Cost & Carbon Optimization Cost & Carbon Optimization 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:

AWS and Azure—Methodology—Cloud Carbon Footprint
Google—Efficiency—Data Centers
Rest of the world—Global PUEs

Wasted Energy calculation is based on the assumption that every CPU cycle that is not utilized wastes about 1/3*TDP (Thermal Design Power). The proportion of unutilized CPU cycles is roughly 100% - CPU usage %. With those assumptions, the Wasted Energy (WE) is calculated as WE = Wp * 1/3 * TDP, where Wp is 0 for 100% CPU utilization and 1 when the CPU utilization is equal to the idle threshold.

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

A data center’s carbon intensity is equal to the average carbon intensity of the country where it is located. This means that for large countries the national differences are not considered.
Carbon intensity values used on calculations are an annual average.

Carbon intensity data sources

European Union (EU)—Greenhouse gas emission intensity of electricity generation
Rest of the world—Carbon intensity of electricity generation

Cost & Carbon Optimization Cost & Carbon Optimization can collect public price list data from cloud providers available data on a daily basis, limited to the regions where OneAgents are deployed and cloud extensions are configured.

Every hour, the same workflow that generates the data for energy and emissions also calculates the hourly cost of a host based on the public price list matched with its cloud vendor, region, and instance type.

Both business events follow the Dynatrace Semantic Dictionary schema.

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

The Hosts tab details cost, 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 Receiving network traffic. Select a host name to view the host details page in Infrastructure & Operations.

Cost & Carbon Optimization Cost & Carbon Optimization 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.

Use cases

Cost reporting and allocation
Carbon reporting and allocation
Carbon reduction
Usage optimization
Cost anomaly management

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