Send data to Dynatrace with OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry is an observability framework for cloud-native software. It is used to instrument frameworks and components and export telemetry data (traces, metrics and logs) for analysis to gain insights into your software's performance and behavior. Dynatrace is a key contributor to this open source project.

You can use OpenTelemetry in Dynatrace to:

Extend Dynatrace technology coverage for technologies that are not supported out of the box by OneAgent
Enrich telemetry data with additional spans and metrics

Ingest trace data

You can ingest OpenTelemetry trace data (traces and spans) in two different ways:

In combination with OneAgentInstrument without OneAgent

Available for: Java, Go, Node.js, PHP, and .NET on all platforms supported by OneAgent

Use this approach:

For services that are already instrumented by OneAgent automatically
To extend visibility into frameworks and libraries instrumented with OpenTelemetry
To customize the distributed traces

For details, see OpenTelemetry traces with OneAgent.

Available for all languages supported by OpenTelemetry Tracing

Use this approach:

For services that cannot be instrumented by a OneAgent code module
When the component you want to monitor already exposes trace data in OpenTelemetry format (OTLP)

For details, see OpenTelemetry instrumentation guide.

Ingest custom metrics

You can send metrics to Dynatrace via any of the following options:

The maturity and stability of the OpenTelemetry Metrics SDK implementations differs between programming languages and can be checked on the OpenTelemetry website.

Ingest logs

Dynatrace automatically collects log and event data from a vast array of technologies. With generic log ingestion, you can stream log records to a system and have Dynatrace transform the stream into meaningful log messages. See Log Monitoring.

OpenTelemetry logging is currently under active development. We will offer an integration in a future release.