Performance
OpenTelemetry metrics are great for measuring and improving your application's performance. This page lists several methods you can leverage to improve your application's performance as well as your overall experience when exporting OpenTelemetry metrics to Dynatrace.
Compression
Dynatrace recommends that you enable gzip compression on your OTLP exporters.
The default compression on the OTLP exporter is not set, but it can be configured through the following environment variables:
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_COMPRESSIONOTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_TRACES_COMPRESSIONOTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_METRICS_COMPRESSION
Acceptable values are none or gzip.
Payload size
We recommend a maximum payload size of 4MB (the default limit).
If that limit is exceeded, the entire OTLP message is dropped.
Batching
If you use an OpenTelemetry collector, we highly recommend that you use a batch processor.
Batching helps to better compress the data and reduce the number of outgoing connections required to transmit data to Dynatrace.
See this GitHub readme for more information.
Limits
| Entity | Limit | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Metric key length, characters | Min: 3, Max: 250 | The minimum and maximum total length of a metric key. If a metric key is longer than the maximum length, the metric key is truncated to 250 characters. If a metric key is shorter than 3 characters, the metric key is padded with underscore characters to make it reach the minimum requirement (for example, a becomes a__). |
| Dimension key length, characters | Min: 1, Max: 100 | The minimum and maximum total length of a dimension key. If the maximum length is exceeded, the dimension key is truncated to 100 characters. |
| Dimension value length, characters | 255 | The maximum total length of a dimension value. If the maximum length is exceeded, the dimension value is truncated to 255 characters. |
| Number of dimensions per metric data point | 50 | The maximum total number of dimensions in a single metric data point. If the number of dimensions is exceeded, the whole data point is dropped. |
| Total number of possible metric keys per environment | 20,000 | The maximum number of metric keys that can be registered in Dynatrace. |
| Number of tuples per month per metric | 1,000,000 | The maximum number of tuples (unique metric-dimension key-value type combinations) for each metric key for the last 30 days. |
| Number of tuples per month for all custom metrics | 50,000,000 | The maximum number of tuples (unique metric-dimension key-value type combinations) for all custom metrics for the last 30 days. |
| Instrument unit, characters | 63 | The maximum total length of the instrument unit. If the maximum length is exceeded, the unit is dropped. |
| Instrument description, characters | 1023 | The maximum total length of the instrument description. If the maximum length is exceeded, the instrument description is truncated to 1023 characters. |