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Tags and metadata

Dynatrace OneAgent automatically discovers components in your environment, such as process groups, services and real user applications. Not only can these entities be auto-discovered, their underlying technologies can also be accurately identified (for example, Apache HTTP server, IBM WebSphere, and much more). As part of this auto-detection, Dynatrace discovers network topology as well. Once traffic is monitored, Dynatrace detects also load balancers and proxies. Moreover, Dynatrace supports 3rd party integrations, thus augmenting this data with topology and monitoring information from AWS, VMware, Azure, OpenStack, and more.

Managing such a huge amount of information, however, and organizing such large monitoring environments is a real challenge. To effectively cope with this challenge, Dynatrace supports tags and metadata. Tags and metadata enable you to organize your monitored environments in a meaningful way. Tags in Dynatrace are basically labels or markers while metadata are key/value pairs that are inherent to any monitored entity. Metadata are mainly used for defining extra information for entities while tags are used for organizing entities. You can also create tags based on metadata. In general, although tags and metadata are closely related, they are different concepts and are created and used in a different way.

Basic concepts

  • Tags versus metadata
  • Best practices and recommendations for tagging
  • Best practices for scaling tagging and management-zone rules

Setup

  • Define and apply tags
  • Define tags based on environment variables

Reference

  • Regular expressions in Dynatrace

Use cases

Leverage tags defined in Cloud Foundry deployments
Leverage tags defined in Kubernetes deployments Leverage tags defined in OpenShift deployments
Define tags and metadata for hosts
Define your own process group metadata