Ingest metrics with Dynatrace extensions and metric API v1

If your code exports metrics that you want Dynatrace to ingest and analyze, you can register these as custom metrics.

Custom vs built-in metrics

All metrics that are automatically detected and analyzed following installation of OneAgent are considered to be built-in metrics. Built-in metrics cover a wide range of supported technologies, including Apache Tomcat, NGINX, Couchbase, RabbitMQ, Cassandra, Jetty, and many others.

A custom metric is defined as a new type of metric that offers a user-provided metric identifier and unit of measure. The semantics of custom metrics are defined by you and aren't included in the default OneAgent installation. Custom metrics are sent to Dynatrace through various interfaces including the Dynatrace API, OneAgent, ActiveGate, and JMX/PMI extensions. Following the definition of a custom metric, the metric can be reported for multiple monitored components. Each component’s custom metric results in a separate timeseries.

For example, if you define a new custom metric called Files count that counts the newly created files within a directory, this new metric can be collected either for one host or for two individual hosts. Collecting the same metric for two individual hosts results in two timeseries of the same custom metric type, as shown in the example below:

Note: For the purposes of calculating monitoring consumption, collecting the same custom metric for two hosts counts as two separate custom metrics.

Defining and reporting custom metrics

Dynatrace offers the following methods of defining and reporting custom metrics:

• Custom-defined OneAgent extensions or ActiveGate extensions
• Custom JMX definitions that report additional metrics exported by Java processes.
• Use of the Timeseries v1 API to register and send custom metrics.

To view the custom extensions that are currently enabled within your environment, go to Settings > Monitoring > Monitored technologies and select the Custom extensions tab. See the example below.

Data retention for custom metrics

Dynatrace metric-data persistence follows a data-retention strategy that aggregates metrics over time. The data-retention strategy applied to custom metrics is identical to the data-retention strategy applied to built-in timeseries metrics.

Dimensional metrics

Dimensional metrics, also known as "tags" within other timeseries databases, enable fine-grained splitting of the same collected metric. In simple terms, a dimensional metric generates a stacked timeseries chart on a monitored component.

An example of a dimensional metric on a single host is network traffic split by network card. In this example, the metric is collected on a host but the metric itself is split based on all network devices on the host. See example below

Each dimensional value (each network card in this example) generates an individual timeseries within the chart. Therefore, for purposes of calculating custom-metric consumption, each dimensional value is counted as a separate custom metric.