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 events for alerting

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

Export custom event for alerting definition

From the navigation menu, select Settings > Anomaly detection > Custom events for alerting.
Select the pencil icon next to the alert of your choice.
In the URL, find the 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 event for alerting. 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 event for the alerting identifier you determined in the previous step.
The call returns the JSON payload containing a custom event for the alerting 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.

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.

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.