topic Re: How does purepath work? Does it affect the performance and stability of the application？ in Open Q&A

Understand How PurePath Works and Its Impact on Application Performance

Yelijah — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 10:56:11 GMT

Summary: This thread explains the PurePath tracing mechanism and how it captures distributed transactions. It also discusses performance impact considerations and the lightweight nature of Dynatrace tracing.

How does purepath work? Does it affect the performance and stability of the application？ By the way, my application uses tomcat and nginx

Re: How does purepath work? Does it affect the performance and stability of the application？

Taylor-Sanchez — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 04:15:46 GMT

Purepaths work by analyzing distributed tracing and code-level analysis with user experience data, technology such as OpenTelemetry, and code-level analytics.

When requests are sent through to Dynatrace, essentially the distributed traces are captured by the Dynatrace OneAgent and ingested OpenTelemetry traces. More on this can be found via the following link:
https://www.dynatrace.com/support/help/observe-and-explore/purepath-distributed-traces/distributed-traces-overview

Regarding performance and stability, since it is a requirement of the OneAgent to be instrumented on the host to ingest these metrics, the overall resource consumption and overhead should be low.

Re: How does purepath work? Does it affect the performance and stability of the application？

Yelijah — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 05:59:05 GMT

How the one agent analyzes my java application? Most of other APM use java agent to modify code and produce traces, but I couldn't see any java agent in Dynatrace.

Re: How does purepath work? Does it affect the performance and stability of the application？

AntonPineiro — Fri, 25 Aug 2023 06:59:19 GMT

Hi,

Dynatrace has one agent for all technologies, name "OneAgent" is for that.

They explain how agent works here.

Best regards