Welcome to DPS SaaS Cost Intelligence: a new home for managing your Dynatrace spend

[Sophie_Mayerw]

 

Most teams know how much they spend on observability. Far fewer can say why it moved last month, who drove it, and what to do about it. With a Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS), that question matters more, because every capability draws from one shared pool. A retention setting, an OpenPipeline rule, a dashboard's auto-refresh interval, and a workflow's query all consume from that pool. Each is a small, ongoing financial decision made by whoever configured it.

That's why we're renaming this group from DPS Cost Allocation to DPS SaaS Cost Intelligence. Allocation is still a core topic here. It's now one part of a bigger picture: helping you go from a billing number to an explanation and a next step, without becoming a billing expert first.

Where to start: the new "Manage your costs" docs

We've rebuilt our documentation around the way cost management actually works. Start at docs.dynatrace.com/docs/manage-your-costs. It follows five steps that build on each other:

1. View: See what you're consuming in Account Management, the ready-made Usage - Overview dashboard, or by exporting cost data via API.
2. Allocate: Tag consumption with cost centers and products so every line item has an owner (showback and chargeback).
3. Predict: Read the built-in forecast, project your run rate with DQL, and estimate new workloads before they hit your bill.
4. Control: Set budgets aligned to your commitment and cost monitors that catch anomalies. When an alert fires, trace it back to the source.
5. Optimize: Send and keep less data, and query it more efficiently, guided by drill-down dashboards for traces, logs, and Full-Stack.

If Dynatrace Assist is activated in your environment, you can also ask it cost and usage questions in natural language.

What this group is for

• Ask: "My costs spiked on Tuesday. Where do I start?"
• Share: Allocation setups, DQL queries, dashboards, and alert configurations that worked for you. (There's also the community examples repository on GitHub.)
• Shape: Tell us what's missing. We read this group, and your feedback directly informs what we build next.

Let's start the conversation

Reply below and tell us:

• Which of the five steps is your biggest challenge today?
• What question about your DPS spend do you wish you could answer in seconds?
• Do you share costs across teams? Which allocation model do you use (cost centers, products, both)?

We'll answer as many as we can, and the most common questions will shape our next posts.

[gschramm]

I am managing the cost for the whole environment. Everything is tagged with costcenter & product.  So that's the step 2 on your list, we have this fully implemented. I am struggling with 1 since forever. 

I took a look at the Usage dashboards today, here are my thoughts:

• OOTB they just displaying usage, not actual costs. Of course usage can be translated to costs, but this is an additional step.
• There is a variable on the dashboards called "RatecardMapping" which holds units and prices. However if I am adjusting to match our ratecard I need to store the dashboard as a new copy. Also there are 5 usage dashboards, meaning I need to make this adjustment 5 times and store 5 copies. This is cumbersome to maintain.

The challenge I am actually facing is not addressed. It's a simple questions that I get frequently from teams/users:

• Are we in budget?
• What is our daily/weekly/monthly spend?
• Cost breakdown by feature and/or product

I am transparent with the price list. What the teams are hoping for is a simple dashboard that shows them their current runrate, split by feature:
Application X - 8k / monthy, 1k for host monitoring, 4k for RUM, 3k for logs

The overview in the account management is useful for me as an admin, but I can't filter the chart by anything that exists in the product, security context, management group.. nothing like that exists there. It's just too disconnected. Account management is show the actually billable costs, but aggregated. The product shows usage but lacks the connect to actual costs and budgets.

The most convenient way would be to have an ootb dashboards that needs ZERO touch, it's using the ratecard from account management. And the costs are part of the IAM system, utilizing the dt.security_context. A budget is defined per security context. In that case who ever opens the dashboard would see the costs occuring for everything that he/she is entitled to see. The forecase would reflect how the application is doing against its own budget.