Ingest OpenTelemetry metrics

When ingesting OpenTelemetry metrics, the following rules and details apply.

Dynatrace mapping

Dynatrace maps the individual OpenTelemetry instruments to the following Dynatrace metric types:

Instrument
with temporality
maps to Dynatrace
Counter
Delta
Counter
Counter
Cumulative
N/A
Gauge
N/A
Gauge
Explicit bucket histogram
Delta
Histogram
Exponential Histogram 1
Delta
Exponential Histogram
UpDownCounter
Delta
Counter
UpDownCounter
Cumulative
Gauge
Summary
N/A
N/A
1

For Exponential Histogram, Dynatrace ingests the histogram's min|max|sum|count but doesn't ingest the buckets.

Histogram support

Histograms are supported starting Dynatrace version 1.300.

Attribute ingestion

OpenTelemetry supports attributes on different levels in an OpenTelemetry metric request (that is, data points, scopes, and resources). Because attributes are saved in a flattened fashion on the Dynatrace side, there may be name collisions if attributes on different levels share the same name.

To handle such name conflicts, Dynatrace applies the following order of priority to choose which attribute will be ingested:

  1. Data point attributes
  2. Scope attributes
  3. Resource attributes

For example, if there is a data point and a scope attribute with the same name, the value of the data point will take precedence. Similarly, if a scope and resource attribute share the same name, Dynatrace will ingest the value of the scope attribute.