Best Resources to Target with Terraform

woodchucker — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 16:23:59 GMT

We are beginning our adoption/ implementation of Dynatrace and before we're in too deep we want to try to capture some low hanging fruit with IaC. We're trying to greenfield as much as possible, at the same time we're also trying to invest heavily in using Terraform where it makes the most sense. Being brand new to Dynatrace we don't have that tribal knowledge that'd tell us what should be managed via IaC and what juice isn't worth the squeeze.

That said, we have a vague idea of a few resources to target like alerts, template/ boilerplate dashboards and IAM roles but we know there's literally hundreds of resources we can manage within Terraform.

Would anyone be able to suggest what we should target first for IaC management? What we should maybe look at for Day 2 implementation and maybe what's not worth trying to manage within IaC?

Re: Best Resources to Target with Terraform

t_pawlak — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 12:16:30 GMT

Sure — I would answer like this:

I would start with the basic, repeatable configuration items that help establish standards across the environment:

auto-tags,
management zones,
host naming,
process group naming,
service naming,
basic alerting profiles,
notification integrations,
optionally some baseline dashboards

These are good first targets for Terraform because they help standardize the environment early and avoid manual differences between applications, teams, or tenants.

I would not try to manage everything in Terraform from day one. Start simple: create a few baseline modules, onboard one application or one team as a pattern, validate that naming, tagging and MZs work correctly, and only then expand.

Once the basics are stable, you can move to a more advanced approach using modules, variables, for_each loops, multiple environments, more complex alerting, SLOs, request attributes, custom anomaly detection, dashboards per team/application, etc.

So my recommendation would be: start with standards and foundations first, then gradually automate the more complex configurations.

Later, you can go one step further and start templating the configuration using variables, conditions and dynamic blocks.

For example, you can have a separate environment file:

# environments/prep.tfvars environment = "PREP" auto_tag_name = "Tomek_terraform_new_template" kubernetes_namespace_value = ["tomek"] synthetic_monitor_name_value = "Tomek_synthetic_new_template" mode = "FULL" external_monitor_name_value = "Tomek-external-monitor_new_template"

Then, inside the module, you can use conditions and dynamic rules, for example:

dynamic "rule" { for_each = var.synthetic_monitor_name_value != null ? [var.synthetic_monitor_name_value] : [] content { type = "ME" enabled = true attribute_rule { entity_type = "BROWSER_MONITOR" attribute_conditions { condition { key = "BROWSER_MONITOR_TAGS" operator = "TAG_KEY_EQUALS" tag = var.auto_tag_name } } } } }

This allows one module to support multiple use cases: Kubernetes, synthetic monitors, external monitors, web apps, databases, etc. You only control the behavior through variables and separate .tfvars files per environment.

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Best Resources to Target with Terraform

Re: Best Resources to Target with Terraform