Customize data with extensions

You can tailor various aspects of Dynatrace to the specifics of data acquired by your extension. You can also use the extension to introduce a new configuration in your environment (for example, organize data in dashboards, create new alerts, or introduce complex metrics).

Custom Dynatrace UI

The Extensions 2.0 framework enables you to tailor the Dynatrace UI for the specific needs of the data ingested by your extension. You can add customized dashboards or specialized unified analysis pages to your extension.

For more information, see Extend Dynatrace with domain-specific web UI.

Custom metric events

You can create custom metric events based on the metrics extracted by your extension and add the exported definitions to your extension archive. This way, you can distribute the custom metric events among Dynatrace environments.

Export custom event for alerting definition

From the navigation menu, select Settings > Anomaly detection > Metric events.
Expand the event of your choice.
Scroll to the bottom of the definition where you'll find the Config id parameter (for example, id=1be8d58d-71a7-4566-9058-754d635363ab) and save the parameter value.
Run the following command to get the definition of the custom metric event. For this example, we use the Dynatrace SaaS URL:
```
shell
curl -X GET "https://{env-id}.live.dynatrace.com/api/config/v1/anomalyDetection/metricEvents/{custom-event-id}" \
-H "accept: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
-H "Authorization: Api-Token `{api-token}"
```
Replace:
- {env-id} with your Environment ID.
- {api-token} with an API token that has the required permissions.
- {custom-event-id} with the custom metric event identifier you determined in the previous step.
The call returns the JSON payload containing a custom metric event definition. Save it as a JSON file.
Declare the exported JSON files in your extension.yaml file and add them to your extension package.

For more information, see Extensions 2.0 hands-on excercise.

After you upload or update an extension containing custom metric events, make sure you enable the events you'd like to use. The extension-imported events are disabled by default after each upload and activation, inluding an update. To enable metric events, go to select Settings > Anomaly detection > Metric events.

Custom topology

After you start to send in your own data via an extension, you might be interested in extending the built-in topology model by adding your own domain-related entity types and relationships.

For more information, see Custom topology model.

Custom metric metadata

To add more context to data points and their dimensions ingested by your extension, your custom metric can carry additional useful information, such as the unit of measurement, display name, and value ranges.

You can provide such information via custom metric metadata. Metadata and data points are stored independently from data points and tied together by the metric key. You can push data points and set metadata in any order.

For more information, see Custom metric metadata.

Data filtering

Extensions also allow you to filter data based on specific criteria. This filtering capability is particularly useful for SNMP extensions, where you might want to limit the data that is ingested by the extension

Filters match entity names to include/exclude certain configurations from monitoring. This makes the data more relevant and saves unnecessary license consumption. Filters work with a specific entity type and support the following syntax:

Expression	Description
`$eq(<str>)`	Checks if `<str>` matches what you're filtering
`$prefix(...)`	Begins with …
`$suffix(...)`	Ends with …
`$contains(...)`	Contains …
`$and(<expr1>, <expr2>)`	Chains two or more of the above expressions with the AND operator
`$or(<expr1>, <expr2>)`	Chains two or more of the above expressions with the OR operator
`$not(<expr>)`	Negates an expression. For example, to exclude all Pools from the Common partition, you can add the `$not($prefix(/Common/))` filter.

Custom process group detection rules

Dynatrace detects which processes are part of the same process groups by means of a default set of detection rules. However, you can add your own process detection rules suited to the data retrieved by your extension.

For more information, see Process group detection.