topic Re: Why a problem PID could be negative value in Alerting

Why a problem PID could be negative value

zero_ho — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 06:02:14 GMT

Just wonder why and when a Dynatrace Problem's unique PID (the long one) would be assigned with negative values. This is related to a custom integration which Dynatrace Problem API will be used to retrieve the PID for some logic checkings.

For example:

{ "State":"RESOLVED", "ProblemID":"P-251165", "PID":"-8318705438857443558_1762084959707V2", "ProblemTitle":"Browser monitor global outage", "ProblemURL":"https:\/\/MASKED\/#problems\/problemdetails;pid=-8318705438857443558_1762084959707V2", "ProblemSeverity":"AVAILABILITY", "Tags":"", "ImpactedEntities":[ { "type":"SYNTHETIC_TEST", "name":"zwiki-test", "entity":"SYNTHETIC_TEST-1BAA724C5C4D1005" } ], "ImpactedEntityNames":"zwiki-test", "ProblemDetailsJSON":{ "id":"-8318705438857443558_1762084959707V2", "startTime":1762084959707, "endTime":1762085854578, .....

Thank you very much.

Zero

Re: Why a problem PID could be negative value

Julius_Loman — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 07:20:38 GMT

I'd bet it's a random long type identifier (the value preceded by _), followed by the current epoch timestamp in miliseconds. Long type can have negative values. @wolfgang_beer, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Re: Why a problem PID could be negative value

wolfgang_beer — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 12:25:19 GMT

@Julius_Loman is perfectly right. I don't really like the long id, in the future we will replace this with a better ID.