How to TAG Synthetic Monitors with the location name

[ShahbazKhan]

Summary

Learn how to automatically tag Dynatrace Synthetic monitors based on their execution location (for example, London or Frankfurt) so you can use those tags in Maintenance Windows, filtering, and alerting workflows.

This approach enables location-based control for Synthetic Browser and HTTP monitors, which is not available out of the box.

• Summary
• Problem
• Cause
• Resolution
• Step 1 – Create an automatic tagging rule
• Step 2 – Use the tag in Maintenance Windows
• Example Use Cases
• Best Practices
• What's next
• Related reading

Problem

Dynatrace Maintenance Windows allow filtering using:

• Tags
• Synthetic entities

However, they do not support direct filtering by Synthetic location name (public or private locations).

This makes it difficult to:

• Silence alerts for monitors running from specific regions
• Handle maintenance for location-specific outages
• Apply environment-specific monitoring rules

Cause

Synthetic locations are not exposed as a native filter dimension in Maintenance Windows.

As a result, you cannot directly select:

“All monitors running from London”

without introducing an intermediate layer (such as tagging).

Resolution

Use automatic tagging with entity selectors to assign tags to Synthetic monitors based on the location they run on.

Step 1 – Create an automatic tagging rule

Create a tag that represents the location (for example: location:London).

Use the following entity selector logic:

• For Browser Monitors

type("SYNTHETIC_TEST"),fromRelationships.runsOn(type("SYNTHETIC_LOCATION"),customizedName("London"))

• For HTTP Monitors

type("HTTP_CHECK"),fromRelationships.runsOn(type("SYNTHETIC_LOCATION"),customizedName("London"))

These selectors tag monitors based on the location they execute from.

For example, 

Step 2 – Use the tag in Maintenance Windows

Once applied, you can:

• Filter Maintenance Windows by the tag (for example: location:London)
• Scope maintenance to specific Synthetic locations
• Avoid unnecessary alert noise during regional outages or maintenance

 Example Use Cases

This tagging approach is especially useful for:

• 🌍 Region-specific maintenance windows (e.g., Europe vs US)
• 🧪 Testing Synthetic performance by location
• 🚫 Silencing alerts when a single Synthetic location is degraded
• 🔐 Managing private Synthetic locations independently

Best Practices

• Use a consistent naming convention such as:
  • location:London
  • location:Frankfurt
• Avoid free-text tags; standardize across teams
• Combine with:
  • Management Zones
  • Alerting profiles
    for more granular control

What's next

If the setup doesn’t work as expected, collect the following before contacting support:

• Link to the automatic tagging rule
• Maintenance Window configuration
• Affected Synthetic monitor(s)

Then: 👉 Open an in-product chat via Dynatrace for further assistance.

Related reading

📖  Automatic tagging

📖  How to define a maintenance window