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
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