Lack of correlation between OneAgent and OpenTelemetry traces

MatheusMF — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:21:50 GMT

Hello everyone,
We are investigating a correlation issue between a service monitored by Dynatrace OneAgent and downstream services instrumented with OpenTelemetry whose traces are ingested through an OpenTelemetry Collector.
Current observations:
W3C Trace Context propagation appears to be working correctly.
The same Trace ID is preserved across the transaction.
Parent-child span relationships are maintained.
The downstream OpenTelemetry service continues the existing trace rather than creating a new one.
Dynatrace shows the call as "Requests to unmonitored hosts".
Expected service-to-service relationships are not created in Services Classic.
Actions already performed
Enabled W3C Trace Context propagation.
Tested with OneAgent OpenTelemetry integration features enabled and disabled.
Restarted the affected components after configuration changes.
Validated that the traceparent header is preserved end-to-end.
Additional observations
The environment uses OpenTelemetry Collector for trace ingestion.
Some gateway logs report messages similar to:
invalid distributedTracingLink provided: null

Proprietary Dynatrace headers do not appear to be propagated consistently, while W3C headers are preserved.
Questions
Is this behavior a known limitation when correlating OneAgent-generated traces with traces ingested through an OpenTelemetry Collector?
Is "Requests to unmonitored hosts" expected even when W3C propagation is working correctly?
Are there specific Collector, OTLP, or Dynatrace configurations required to establish service relationships between OneAgent-monitored services and OpenTelemetry-instrumented services?
Has anyone successfully implemented end-to-end correlation in a similar architecture?
Any guidance or shared experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.

topic Lack of correlation between OneAgent and OpenTelemetry traces in OTel

Lack of correlation between OneAgent and OpenTelemetry traces