We’re back with yet another exciting Dynatrace-oriented Community Challenge! This time the theme is utterly universal though. As you know, Dynatrace is full of various features making your observability experience flawless. And obviously, among many options, on everyone’s shelf of tools there are always these that you value the most.
So, tell us in the comments below, what are your favorite Dynatrace features! Which are the most exciting? Which are the most essential to make your observability reliable every time, everywhere? Share your podium of Top 3 Dynatrace features and don’t hesitate to shed some light on the background (why have you chosen these three particular features?). It might be extremely inspiring for others!
Benefits of taking Community Challenges!
Every participant receives a “Dynatrace Podium Badge”
You will also get +100 bonus points for extra activity
I need to give Grail the gold medal as it is what unlocks almost everything else to be as good as it can be.
The silver medal for me goes to the app framework. The power to provide any answer based on the data in Grail is unique and a true enabler of billions of use cases.
As for the bronze, having been in extensions for so long I need to give it a medal instead of going with the more obvious ones such as Dynatrace Intelligence or the OneAgent. The ability to say “yes” to monitor anything is such a great feeling, and when combined with the Gold/Silver medalist, it provides an immeasurable value to so many companies.
Workflows - For me, they’ve such a great power and flexibility. Almost everything can be done with them!
Extensions - The capability of monitor everything is awesome, so deserve the silver medal!
Dynatrace Community - IDK if is it valid, but for me the main difference between the actual Observability tools is a community that you can count on to solve problems, share ideas and really be a part of a true community. So even if this is not a “True feature”, deserves to be in the podium.
1 - Grail. This one is mandatory… Without grail, none of the new features will be possible.
2 - Workflows. Started to play with workflows just recently, and indeed… it opens a new level of product capabilities…
3 - OneAgent. This one can’t be forgot… whether by deploying in a host, or orchestrating with Operator. We don’t need to worry on how the data will be collected, OneAgent do all the job for us.
This is an interesting challenge! It is a difficult one!
Gold: OneAgent
Yes, I still have the last appmon manual. It had several thousand pages. OneAgent was the automation of that manual. Today, we have it for granted, but having seen what was before, and what still happens with some other solutions, without this, everything else would not be…
Silver: Extensibility
Be it apps, EF2, or other approaches (eg. entities), the way that we can, in a fast way, extend Dynatrace to do other things is absolutely amazing!
Bronze: AI at the core
Yes, when I started working with Dynatrace, I didn’t value Davis. That changed a little at Perform 2020 🤣 But over the years, and especially in the last three years, for me it’s ever more amazing that Dynatrace got this vision right more than a decade ago.
GRAIL
My whole monitoring strategy relies on logs! Without this kinda of storage I couldn’t have done it! (all Elastic people out there you need to try it)
OpenPipeline
cannot live without it when you ingest incredible amount of logs that need re-processing pretty much in every single use case (one word: SAP)
DQL
Follows consequentially and it stimulates my mind in so many ways!
Honorable mentions!
Davis Anomaly Detection
it has been vital for my alerting strategy in combination with all of the above and below!
Lookup Tables
I have been playing with it and it bring so much value if play it right as a collaboration booster.
Dynatrace SaaS has been so much fun, not easy at all as it has once again shifted our minds in new fields that simple monitoring people weren’t acquanted to, but very stimulating! I feel like an artists
I’m not mentioning Oneagent altought I know how fundamental it was but in the long run I found that too many people were reling on its magic to extract monitoring value, forgetting that the real deep value is always in the knowledgable humans that have sweat on their system for years.
1. Grail (Dynatrace Data Lakehouse) – because it finally gives me one place for logs, metrics, traces and events, with fast search and correlation. Perfect for going from “question” to “answer” without switching tools.
2. DQL (Dynatrace Query Language) – because it gives me full control over analysis: from simple filtering to advanced correlations, aggregations, and custom views/alerts. For me, it’s the “truth language” in Dynatrace.
3. OneAgent + automatic instrumentation – because it’s the foundation of reliable observability: fast rollout, end-to-end coverage, less manual work, and consistent data every time.
!!! Honorable mention: automation — Dynatrace Workflows, Configuration as Code (e.g., Terraform / Monaco / APIs) and operational automation. A real game-changer for me: less manual clicking, repeatability, consistent standards across environments, and faster, version-controlled changes with auditability !!!
1. Workflows: The ability to automate against your observability is MASSIVE. This opens the door to so many things, including the new agentic steps (in preview). By far my favorite feature to have in the same platform as all my observability data.
2. Lookup Tables: Not that this was my idea or anything (it was), or that I gave an entire breakout session on this (I did), but having the ability to correlate the data already in Dynatrace with any custom data I want has changed the way we can use Dynatrace. Now it’s open season for everyone. You don’t need to know near as much about the data to start making sense of it. We can identify customers in real-time!
3. OpenPipeline: I have truly enjoyed having access to create many pipelines and routes to simplify, organize, and enrich the data we’re constantly pumping into the Dynatrace platform. Whether it be parsing complex logs or creating custom metrics on spans, OpenPipeline has truly been a blessing.
My answer is probably based on my experience currently, but I would say:
First place: OneAgent - everything starts here
Second place: Davis - it reads the data for us and interprets it so we can further use it
Third place: Extensions - I think this gives us a lot of opportunities to ingest, interpret and visualize different metrics from different technologies. Some things would not be possible without them. I really like the idea and I am sure the variety will get bigger and bigger which is great.
I would also mention DQL + Grail as this has a huge imact on how we can use the data and we can achieve a lot with these. I haven’t added them in my top 3 for the sole reason that I am not that experienced with them yet, as we moved to SaaS quite recently and I am used to working the “old way”, but for sure investing some time and effor in this direction.
I don’t remember with which PM I talked but I was also proposing that 1 year back as I had to convert currency on the fly while data was passing trough pipeline (still they need to incorporate this).
Still lookup is experimental and they need to get full production and that is why I can only put as a mention.
Next year I’ll put it first if I can make fireworks with it!
So much potential!! I love it. (I’m thinking about way to tags stuff, metada enrichment for entities, the business events black hole, we have like infinite use caseeeeeeee :') )
My first follow-up after they implemented it was to get it into OpenPipeline so it doesn’t always need to be used at query time. Still pushing for that.
That was use case #1 since the beggining for me :') Then you know how we are as a species: give us a rock and we’ll start drawing in caves, then cut the leather and so on and so forth.
Jokes aside, I used it in Davis Anomaly Detection. Very efficiant to enrich context in the description with new dims:
Sorry for not agreeing on this one 😥
Lookup Tables are a way forward, but a very basic one. It remembers me of the early 80s, where DNS didn’t yet exist and ALL the hosts on the Internet existed in a unique hosts file, that was pulled from a central server every time someone needed to be sure they had the latest version. And then, through the hosts “lookup table” file, access to the Internet would happen (more info: 123 ). As this was so inefficient, several hacks appeared, like this one.
A very static, but similar, thing. The Internet and DNS and a lot of related stuff have come a long way since those static lookup host files. So, that’s what lookup tables look to me at the moment. We need much more than that…
Every participant receives a “Dynatrace Podium Badge”
Workflows - For me, they’ve such a great power and flexibility. Almost everything can be done with them!
Extensions - The capability of monitor everything is awesome, so deserve the silver medal!
Dynatrace Community - IDK if is it valid, but for me the main difference between the actual Observability tools is a community that you can count on to solve problems, share ideas and really be a part of a true community. So even if this is not a “True feature”, deserves to be in the podium.
you need to try it)