Extensions
- Latest Dynatrace
- Overview
- 2-min read
- Published Jun 16, 2025
What are Extensions?
Extensions are modular packages that define how Dynatrace collects and structures telemetry data from external sources. Each extension is executed by the Extension Execution Controller (EEC), which runs in your environment.
How do Extensions work?
Extensions let you expand Dynatrace beyond its out-of-the-box monitoring capabilities. They allow you to collect telemetry data such as metrics, events, and logs from external technologies.
With extensions, you can:
- Ingest data from technologies not natively supported.
- Create tailored monitoring logic for your environment.
- Visualize and analyze custom data.
Why use Extensions?
Extensions are useful when you need to monitor a technology or service that Dynatrace doesn’t automatically detect. They provide advanced customization and observability for nearly any data source.
Key benefits
- Automatic distribution to ActiveGates and OneAgent with built-in failover.
- Full topology modeling, including custom entities and relationship mapping.
- Rich metric metadata for consistent context-aware monitoring.
- Possibility to create custom extensions tailored to your needs:
- Declarative, human-readable YAML format (no coding required for featured data sources).
- Coded extensions using Python data source for flexibility.
Use cases
- SNMP-based monitoring: Monitor network devices.
- SQL-based monitoring: Monitor SQL databases of various vendors.
- Prometheus-based monitoring: Monitor Prometheus exporters.
- WMI-based monitoring: Monitor Windows devices.
- JMX-based monitoring: Acquire data from JMX MBeans.
Where extensions run
OneAgent
Run extensions locally on the monitored host to collect data from local data sources with the Extension Execution Controller.
ActiveGate
Run extensions remotely from an ActiveGate group to collect data from remote technologies and cloud environments.
Kubernetes
Run SQL monitoring extensions on Kubernetes using Dynatrace Operator.
Get started with Extensions
Extensions