Carbon Impact

Latest Dynatrace

Dynatrace Carbon Impact enables you to calculate and monitor your IT carbon footprint. It tracks, reports, and helps you reduce the carbon emissions resulting from your cloud and on-premises infrastructure electricity consumption.

Carbon Impact capabilities

• Calculates your IT carbon footprint on data center and host levels.
• Translates utilization metrics, including CPU, memory, disk and network I/O, into energy consumption in kWh and CO2 equivalent (CO2e).
• Reports carbon dioxide emissions in a single interface, the Carbon Impact dashboard.
• Identifies opportunities to reduce carbon emissions.

Prerequisites

The carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption can be calculated for hosts set up and monitored with OneAgent, because calculations are based on infrastructure metrics.

Install Carbon Impact

To set up Carbon Impact

1. Go to Dynatrace Hub and select Carbon Impact.
2. Go to Settings and select Energy and emission data generation.
3. Select Save.

Data storage and retention

At this point, Carbon Impact starts calculating consumption data every hour, based on infrastructure monitoring metrics.

• The first data point is created an hour after installation.
• Consumption data is stored in Grail with a default retention period of three years. You can adjust this retention time by creating a custom bucket.

Data units

The units of data generated are as follows:

• Electricity consumption is calculated in watt-hours (Wh)
• Carbon dioxide emission is calculated in grams

Calculations

Electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emission are calculated based on guidelines from the Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA). The formula includes the energy consumed by hardware and cooling.

Cooling is included in a standard metric, Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE). This metric, used to measure the energy efficiency of a data center, is a ratio between the total power consumption of a data center, including cooling, lighting, and support equipment energy use, and the power consumed by the IT infrastructure. It describes how much energy IT equipment uses compared to other electrical devices.

The Power Usage Effectiveness varies depending on a data center, but its predefined values for the Cloud providers are published at Cloud Carbon Footprint page.

The Carbon Impact dashboard

The Carbon Impact dashboard provides an at-a-glance view of your IT carbon footprint.

• The Carbon footprint summary reports total CO2e emissions for the selected and preceding timeframes for quick interval-based comparisons.
• Optimization recommendations report idle instances and under-utilized instances. Note: You can adjust thresholds influencing these calculations to your needs, in the Settings field.
• The table groups emissions by data center, listing your cloud and on-premises instances.
• The first chart shows the accumulated carbon footprint and energy consumption over time.
• The second chart allows you to compare carbon emissions over time with a business key performance indicator (KPI) of your choice, derived from any of your captured business events.

The Instances view

The Instances view details energy and CO2e consumption per host instance. You can narrow your search using filters. For example, you can view underutilized instances in a specific AWS data center or top CO2e emitters within a specific host group. Carbon Impact is automatically connected to Dynatrace Smartscape® topology modeling, so it’s easy to see the host details or use Notebooks for ad hoc analysis with DQL.

Advanced Analytics with Notebooks

You can use Notebooks to analyze your carbon footprint data.

Example 1

Get all the bizevents from your carbon footprint.

dqlcopydownload
fetch bizevents
 | filter contains (event.provider, "dynatrace.biz.carbon")

Example 2

Get all the energy and CO2 consumption per host instance.

dqlcopydownload
fetch bizevents
| filter contains (event.provider, "dynatrace.biz.carbon")
| summarize totalEnergy = sum(totalElectricConsumption), totalCO2e = sum(emissions), by:hostId

Results:

Settings

By selecting the gear icon on the top right of a screen, you can move to the Settings screen.
You can deactivate the energy and emission data generation by switching off the toggle.

Optimization options

The Setting screen offers two optimization options:

Idling Optimization
Enables you to detect hosts that are turned on and running, but not actively used or performing tasks.

Under-utilized Optimization
Enables you to detect hosts that are not idle, but use less resources than initially planned, and make changes to their configuration.

In both cases, you need to set parameters that define a host as idle or under-utilized. Default values are based on Google Cloud Platform criteria:

• An idle instance:

  • Uses less than 3% of CPU and
  • Outgoing network traffic is below 100.000 bytes/s or incoming network traffic is below 120.000 bytes/s.

• An under-utilized instance:

  • Uses more than 3% and less than 30% of CPU and
  • Uses less than 50% of memory.

You can adjust the values to your requirements.

Business health performance indicator

Finally, you can define the business health performance indicator of your choice, derived from any of your captured business events.