The new Smartscape: Move faster and make better decisions with a real-time dependency graph of all your digital systems

Making the right decisions in modern IT can feel like changing a tire on a moving car. These environments span millions of rapidly changing entities across the cloud, on-premises, and Kubernetes, with adaptive AI agents that increase complexity as they evolve at runtime. IT leaders are often forced to act on incomplete knowledge, leading to misdirected investments, higher MTTR, architectural drift, and increased compliance risk. Dynatrace Smartscape®, a real-time dependency graph, closes this gap with an always-accurate view of your entire digital ecosystem. You always have full visibility into your entire end-to-end topology—see exactly what’s running in production, where it’s running, and the underlying infrastructure it depends on. The new Smartscape introduces powerful visual analytics, agentless cloud data ingestion, and complete domain-specific metadata, including raw cloud and Kubernetes objects. With richer context and stronger analytics, your teams will work more efficiently, diagnose issues sooner, and make better decisions.

A paradigm shift: Moving from signal monitoring to true entity health understanding

Digital systems continuously evolve and adapt. Making effective decisions requires real-time, always up-to-date insights into how everything is connected—from infrastructure to applications—and understanding the impact on users and the business when issues arise. When an anomaly occurs, you need to quickly pinpoint the root cause, understand why it happened, identify exposed components, and determine which critical services depend on them.

Autonomous AI agents raise expectations for speed, precision, and self-healing IT systems, but, like humans, AI agents rely on high-quality data and rich context to operate effectively. Basic observability signals fall short because they lack contextual information and a holistic view of IT entities and their dependencies, making it difficult to derive impact and causality. In a world of AI agents, an accurate, real-time production context becomes non-negotiable, as only then can you trust AI agents to make the right decisions.

Smartscape has been a core part of the Dynatrace platform for years, and it powers Dynatrace causal AI. Smartscape is a real-time dependency graph that visualizes how your IT components depend on each other, continuously updating as your topology changes. Smartscape maintains AI-ready context across ephemeral components in hybrid and multicloud environments. This real-time discovery and updating happens automatically across multiple sources, so the model always reflects reality and serves as your ultimate single source of truth.

^{Figure 1. Explore your IT systems and their dependencies visually with the new Smartscape app.}

The new Smartscape was developed for cloud native, large-scale environments and comes with major new capabilities:

• Powerful visual analytics in the all-new Smartscape app, including domain-specific views for cloud, Kubernetes, infrastructure, and more.
• Fully native cloud entities with complete metadata and raw cloud/Kubernetes object JSON.
• Agentless cloud data ingest that automatically adds all entity dependencies and policy context.

• Exploration at scale with Dynatrace Query Language (DQL). Run native graph queries (for example, traverse) to multi-hop across millions of relationships with full Grail® context.

These enhancements unlock many high-value use cases, transforming the way you and your teams work.

• End-to-end cloud visibility: Close cloud‑console gaps with full relationship context for faster decisions across multi‑cloud and hybrid environments.
• Understand Kubernetes dependencies immediately: Diagnose issues quicker with full‑fidelity objects, YAML context, and cross‑cluster dependency tracing.
• Stronger security posture: Visualize exposure and attack paths, prioritize by real blast radius, and enforce IAM and configuration best practices.
• Accelerate incident response and collaboration: Use the new Visual Resolution Path to see upstream and downstream dependencies and get Dynatrace Intelligence insights in context. Route alerts to the right owners, cut handoffs, and reduce escalations.
• Validate and optimize architecture and cost: Compare intended vs. runtime architecture, align ownership, and reduce costs using real dependency and utilization context.
• Reliable CMDB/ServiceNow enrichment: Export precise, auto‑discovered dependencies with external IDs for accurate ITSM automation.

Spot and understand patterns instantly with the new Smartscape app’s powerful visual analytics capabilities

The new Smartscape app delivers rich, large-scale visual analysis tailored for modern cloud and AI-native environments, with a smooth and responsive experience at scale.

• Explore thousands of entities interactively and quickly drill down into topology and entity details.
• Navigate your entire environment with all dependencies, or use domain-focused, ready-made Smartscape views for clouds, Kubernetes, classic infrastructure, or services.
• Work in context across the platform:
  • The Visual Resolution Path in the Problems app lets you jump directly into the Smartscape Problems Graph to analyze systemic patterns or blast radius.
  • View topology: an intuitive, in-context action that lets you explore vertical and horizontal topologies for any entity without leaving your app or workflow, which is perfect for understanding dependencies and drilling into details.
• Align views to your business context with segments. Focus your analysis on entities by team ownership, environment, business unit, or region to reduce noise during change windows and reviews. This allows you to understand who owns what and accelerate collaboration with a shared understanding of your IT system.
• Analyze patterns from every angle: switch topology layouts to reveal different insights. force exposes hidden clusters and dependency hubs for dynamic microservice exploration; horizontal traces workflows left to right for end-to-end transactions or CI/CD flows; and vertical highlights layered architectures top to bottom for dependency stacks or escalation paths.

Agentless topology discovery from clouds

Dynatrace can now directly discover entities and relationships from cloud environments, including security groups, VPCs, load balancers, subnets, and other network services, providing accurate connectivity, policy, and configuration context, even without deploying OneAgent. In addition to raw topology, Dynatrace automatically ingests, normalizes, and enriches cloud‑native metadata such as tags, labels, ownership properties, cost centers, compliance attributes, and compute metadata, creating a high-quality semantic layer.

All discovered entities and their metadata are unified in the new Smartscape, revealing practical and actionable insights, for example: Which instances are publicly accessible? How is traffic routed across accounts and regions? How do security groups influence exposure paths? And much more.

Experience the new Smartscape, now Generally Available, in your Dynatrace environment

Explore the new Smartscape app, which will be available in your Dynatrace SaaS environments during the first week of February 2026, and begin uncovering dependencies across clouds, Kubernetes, infrastructure, services, and problems.

For a deeper dive, check out our documentation and walk through the Playground notebook, which guides you step‑by‑step in using DQL to query Kubernetes entities.

And stay tuned: our next blog post in this series will take you even further, exploring the new domain‑specific views in Smartscape.

Ready to get started? Start exploring your digital systems now on the Dynatrace Playground.