📂 Welcome to DPS Cost Allocation! What is it? What is supported? Which use cases can it solve? How should i start?

Erik_Anderssen — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 11:00:12 GMT

What is DPS Cost Allocation?

The Dynatrace Cost Allocation function lets you allocate Dynatrace DPS usage and costs to your cost centers and products that utilize Dynatrace functionality. You can designate cost centers or products for Dynatrace Cost Allocation and associate those with the hosts that utilize Dynatrace resources. This provides a transparent and detailed account of each cost center’s Dynatrace expenditure, helping your organization optimize its budgets.

The Dynatrace Cost Allocation feature incorporates two fields for cost centers and products. You can use either or both fields. These fields reflect your company's Cost Allocation structure, enabling you to develop two distinct perspectives: one based on your cost centers (for example, departments) and another based on your products or services (for example, Application name or Application ID).

Of course, you can customize the use of these fields to fit your company's organizational framework.

What is supported?

The Dynatrace Cost Allocation release in October 2024 provides support for the following capabilities under DPS:

Full-Stack Monitoring

Infrastructure Monitoring

Mainframe Monitoring

Foundation & Discovery

Runtime Vulnerability Analytics

Runtime Application Protection

The current release provides account-level details via API or CSV export from the Account Management Portal.

In addition, visualization can be done with all platform features within the environments (e.g. Dashboards, Notebooks)

Which use cases can it solve?

Dynatrace Cost Allocation offers support for several Finops-related use cases. Here are a few of them:

Chargeback
Enables customers to charge costs to their internal or external Dynatrace users.

Provides a detailed overview of capability usage and expenses.

Particularly useful for service providers or enterprise clients with several cost owners.

Showback

Allows Dynatrace users to track ongoing usage and spending.

Provides detailed daily or weekly overviews without invoicing departments.

Promotes cost awareness and departmental ownership.

Example: A mid-sized software company might use showback to display usage and spending to their users.

Budget management
Helps customers manage their yearly expenses more effectively.

Helps identifying the major cost drivers.

Enables better planning.

Faster Adoption
Speeds up the adoption of current and new capabilities.

Allows administrators to track which departments and applications are using these capabilities and their consumption levels.

Enables better planning for implementing these capabilities in other areas.

How should i start?

These examples serve as a general guide for companies aiming to report usage and costs internally or to customers. We suggest reporting at the highest possible level, such as Business Unit, Department, or Geography, for maintainability.

Example 1: Chargeback - Large Enterprise leveraging FinOps

Innovatech Solutions is an enterprise software company with multiple business units. Each unit is responsible for its software applications and receives an annual maintenance budget.

Innovatech aims to provide monthly cost reports to their business units, detailing costs attributed to their specific areas and giving an overview of the application consumption. They also want to import this data into Flexera to combine it with other vendor costs, enabling them to send an annual invoice to each business unit.

According to the Dynatrace Cost Allocation documentation, they defined a naming convention and configuration strategy. The configuration strategy includes how to set OneAgent host tags for all relevant hosts and how to manage the allow list. The Innovatech Administrator used the Dynatrace Cost Allocation Dashboard (available via Playground or Community Platform) to monitor the progress of the deployment. He set up an automated Account Management API call to export usage and cost data for import into Flexera.

At the end of each month, he distributed a combined cost overview to each business unit, providing detailed information on usage and costs broken down by product (application). At the close of each fiscal year, he sent a bill to each business unit itemizing all incurred expenses.

Example 2: Showback – Mid-sized company

TechNova Enterprises, a mid-sized company, has struggled with consumption control in the past, prompting the need for a showback scenario. They wish to provide their departments with dashboards showing current consumption to avoid unexpected costs.

Following the Dynatrace Cost Allocation documentation, they defined their naming and configuration strategy, including setting OneAgent host tags and managing the allow list. Using the Dynatrace Cost Allocation Dashboard, the TechNova Administrator monitored deployment progress and provided each department with a modified dashboard to track usage and costs, helping them respond to unexpected changes.

More details can be found in the DPS Cost Allocation Documentation:

https://docs.dynatrace.com/docs/manage/dynatrace-platform-subscription/cost-allocation

Re: 📂 Welcome to DPS Cost Allocation! What is it? What is supported? Which use cases can it solve? How should i start?

ragul_rr — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 06:04:37 GMT

Hi @Erik_Anderssen , just a quick question (apologies if this has already been covered in other threads). I understand that the new dashboards shared in this forum provide a great breakdown of DPS consumption (majorly based of hosts). How can we combine these with the classic metrics (e.g., RUM) and metrics available through notebooks (AppEngine/Workflow) into a single dashboard to achieve a comprehensive end-to-end chargeback view? We’re aiming to gain full visibility into all Dynatrace-related costs for individual teams and establish clear allocation models where possible. I’d really appreciate any guidance or best practices on how to approach this, or pointers to relevant resources that could help.

Re: 📂 Welcome to DPS Cost Allocation! What is it? What is supported? Which use cases can it solve? How should i start?

Sophie_Mayerw — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 11:42:11 GMT

Hi @ragul_rr,

that's a great and frequent question. There is a roadmap to cover each and every DPS SaaS capability with Cost Allocation in the future. But we're not there yet. I've just updated the Dashboard here which covers now all supported capabilities again.
There is the possibility to extend this Dashboard to also support the following capabilities:

Log Analytics - Query
Traces - Query
Events - Query
(Metrics - Query is free of charge)
Automation Workflow
AppEngine Functions
Code Monitoring

With the adoption it's possible to have them on the Dashboard. They still will not show up on the Account Management Cost Allocation API or export.

It also involves to map all your Dynatrace users to a cost center and/or product.

It does not cover how to include DEM information, though.

If you're interested in this - please let me know.

topic Re: 📂 Welcome to DPS Cost Allocation! What is it? What is supported? Which use cases can it solve? How should i start? in DPS Cost Allocation

📂 Welcome to DPS Cost Allocation! What is it? What is supported? Which use cases can it solve? How should i start?

Re: 📂 Welcome to DPS Cost Allocation! What is it? What is supported? Which use cases can it solve? How should i start?

Re: 📂 Welcome to DPS Cost Allocation! What is it? What is supported? Which use cases can it solve? How should i start?