Allocate your DPS costs

• Latest Dynatrace
• How-to guide
• 16-min read
• Updated on Apr 30, 2026

Dynatrace Cost Allocation lets you allocate Dynatrace DPS usage to customer-defined cost centers, products, or both. This gives you a transparent and detailed account of each cost center’s Dynatrace expenditures, helping your organization optimize its budgets.

You can customize the use of these fields to fit your company's organizational framework:

The figure below shows how different components in a given Dynatrace environment can be assigned to different cost centers and products.

Cost Allocation overview showing assignment of cost centers and products

Concepts

Cost center

A specific cost center within your organization. This is defined according to your organizational structure. Costs in Dynatrace can be allocated to specific cost centers.

Host tag

The parameter that assigns a host to a specific cost center or product. For more information, see Define tags and metadata for hosts.

Host property

Sometimes used as a synonym for "host tag." For more information, see Define tags and metadata for hosts.

Product

A single product, or group of products, offered by your organization. Costs in Dynatrace can be allocated to specific products.

Telemetry data

Generic term to refer to any single data point that is one of the following: log, trace, metric, or event.

Required permissions

To view or edit Cost Allocation information, your Dynatrace account needs at least one of the permissions as indicated in the table below. More information about these permissions is available at Role-based permissions.

Account Management permissions

Environment-level permissions

The default policy "Read System Events" needs to be assigned to the relevant user group. The actual policy statement is provided in the code block below.

//Grail read data
ALLOW storage:buckets:read WHERE storage:table-name = "dt.system.events";
ALLOW storage:system:read;

Supported capabilities

The table below describes the rate card capabilities for which Cost Allocation is available.

In the case that Cost Allocation isn't available for the given capability, an alternative best practice is recommended.

Set up Cost Allocation

This section describes how to set up Cost Allocation in your Dynatrace environment.

Identify allowed cost centers and products

To configure Cost Allocation you need to explicitly define the cost centers and products to which costs are allocated. Up to 250 cost centers and 250 products can be defined.

The definitions are managed in two separate allow lists: the Cost center allow list and the Product allow list. You can configure these either via Account Management or via the Dynatrace API, as described below.

Via Account Management

To find the two allow lists, go to Account Management > Subscription > Cost management. The allow lists are visible in the Cost center allow list and Product allow list sections.

To add a new cost center or product, select Cost center and follow the steps.

Account management cost center allow list for Cost Allocation host tags

Via the API

Both the cost center and product allow lists can be configured via the Account Management API as described in Dynatrace Platform Subscription API - manage cost allocation.

Configure Cost Allocation for host-based deployments

To set up Cost Allocation in a host-based deployment, configure OneAgent according to the steps in Set up Cost Allocation for OneAgent deployments.

Cost Allocation is configured at the host level. One host can be allocated to a maximum of one cost center and one product.

Configure Cost Allocation for Kubernetes deployments

To set up Cost Allocation in a Kubernetes-based deployment, configure Kubernetes according to the steps in Set up Cost Allocation for Kubernetes deployments.

Cost Allocation is supported for different Kubernetes deployment models.

Configure Cost Allocation for telemetry ingest

With Dynatrace, you can enrich telemetry data with Cost Allocation attributes (dt.cost.costcenter, dt.cost.product) as metadata. Telemetry enrichment with Cost Allocation attributes is possible for all supported ingest methods–whether logs, traces, metrics, or events.

You can use these attributes to allocate usage to your user-defined products and cost centers.

How to get started

No matter which method you use to ingest data, here's how to get going with Cost Allocation telemetry enhancement:

Integrate Cost Allocation metadata

Don’t worry about perfection on day one. Start tagging now, even if it's just for one ingest channel. You can refine and expand to other ingest channels and telemetry types as your FinOps maturity grows.

Configure user-based Cost Allocation for queries, Automation Workflow, and AppEngine Functions

This section describes how to configure Cost Allocation for queries, workflows, and functions. The relevant rate card categories are

Consumption related to each of these categories is triggered by a specific Dynatrace user. Therefore, to allocate costs related to these categories, you'll map the user to the relevant Cost Allocation attributes (whether dt.cost.costcenter or dt.cost.product). To do this, follow the steps below.

Best practices

This section provides best practices for setting up Cost Allocation.

Cost center and product names

How you name your cost centers and products is up to you. We recommend:

Values can be provided as text or numerical strings. If you have both, we recommend to use both the text-based name and the ID, separated by a comma (,) or slash (/). This lets you separate the name and ID after a data export.

Examples:

Handling shared costs

If your host shares services, Cost Allocation doesn't support costs billed to separate cost centers or products. However, you can create a cost center or product for that host and then allocate its costs outside of Dynatrace.

Analyze Cost Allocation data

To analyze Cost Allocation data, you can

Analyze in Dynatrace

Cost Allocation data is stored in Dynatrace Grail as billing usage events. These events can be analyzed

Analyze in Dashboards

To analyze Cost Allocation data you can use the Dynatrace pre-made dashboard.

Get the dashboard

The dashboard is available:

Limitations

Use DQL queries

This section provides various DQL queries that you can use to achieve specific use cases.

fetch dt.system.events
| filter event.kind == "BILLING_USAGE_EVENT"

fetch dt.system.events
| filter event.kind == "BILLING_USAGE_EVENT"
| fieldsKeep event.type, dt.entitiy.host, dt.cost.costcenter, dt.cost.product

fetch dt.system.events
| filter event.kind == "BILLING_USAGE_EVENT"
| summarize count = count(), by:{event.type,dt.cost.costcenter}

Export Cost Allocation data

If you want to view Cost Allocation data in a separate tool, such as Excel or Power BI, you can export the data.

You can export Cost Allocation data via Account Management or the API.

Export Cost Allocation data via Account Management

In Account Management, you can download some or all Cost Allocation data from your current DPS subscription.

Export Cost Allocation data via the API

All Cost Allocation data can be retrieved via the API.

Use the following API call to retrieve Cost Allocation data. Parameters are described in Dynatrace Platform Subscription API - GET cost allocation.

GET /v1/subscriptions/{subscription-uuid}/cost-allocation?field={field}\&environment-id={environment-id}

An example response is provided in the code block below.

{
  "records": [
      { "date": "2024-04-01", "capability": "FULLSTACK_MONITORING","key": "department-A", "costs": 10, "usage": 2000 },
      { "date": "2024-04-01", "capability": "FULLSTACK_MONITORING","key": "department-B", "costs": 40, "usage": 8000 },
      { "date": "2024-04-01", "capability": "LOGS", "key": "department-A", "costs": 70, "usage": 700 },
      { "date": "2024-04-01", "capability": "LOGS", "key": "department-B", "costs": 20, "usage": 200 },
      { "date": "2024-04-01", "capability": "FULLSTACK_MONITORING", "key": "department-E", "costs": 10, "usage": 2000 },
      { "date": "2024-04-01", "capability": "FULLSTACK_MONITORING", "key": "department-F", "costs": 50, "usage": 10000 },
      { "date": "2024-04-01", "capability": "FULLSTACK_MONITORING", "key": null, "costs": 60, "usage": 12000 },
      { "date": "2024-04-01", "capability": "LOGS", "key": null, "costs": 10, "usage": 100 },
      { "date": "2024-04-02", "capability": "FULLSTACK_MONITORING", "key": "department-A", "costs": 10, "usage": 2000 },
      { "date": "2024-04-02", "capability": "FULLSTACK_MONITORING", "key": "department-B", "costs": 40, "usage": 8000 },
      { "date": "2024-04-02", "capability": "FULLSTACK_MONITORING", "key": "department-C", "costs": 70, "usage": 14000 },
      { "date": "2024-04-02", "capability": "LOGS", "key": null, "costs": 500, "usage": 5000 }
         // more daily records

         ],
         "nextPageKey": "...",
         "environmentId": "tenant-A",
         "field": "COSTCENTER"
}

Troubleshooting

If you can't find Cost Allocation data: