What you run · Dynatrace
Deep tracing where it earns its place
Dynatrace is the deep-tracing platform: OneAgent installs once per host and instruments everything automatically, PurePath traces follow every request end to end, and its Davis engine turns the topology it discovers into problems rather than raw alerts. It is licensed per host, so the ordinary node running basic checks pays the same rate as the crown-jewel path that genuinely needs causal depth. We keep Dynatrace on the paths that earn it, and run everything else on an open fleet you own.
01Today
How a Dynatrace estate looks today
A Dynatrace estate runs OneAgent everywhere at one per-host rate, so ordinary nodes on basic checks pay the same price as the crown-jewel paths that need causal depth.
What Dynatrace does best
Dynatrace does depth like nobody else: automatic instrumentation, topology discovery, and causal analysis that genuinely shortens investigations on complex distributed applications. On the services where a minute of latency is revenue, that depth earns its price.
The problem is that per-host pricing does not distinguish the crown jewels from the crowd. Ordinary nodes running ordinary processes, watched by basic checks, pay the same rate as the paths that need causal AI, and renewals grow with the estate whether or not those nodes produce anything anyone reads.
02The five verbs
What we do to a Dynatrace estate
Keep it and govern what flows in, shrink its footprint, cut what it costs, extend it with an agent, and replace only where replacement is honest.
Dynatrace on the crown-jewel paths: the complex, revenue-critical applications where its causal depth and PurePath tracing genuinely shorten incidents and earn the per-host price.
The licensed footprint contracts to the hosts that earn it, deliberately scoped and defended in the renewal conversation with the tier split written down before anyone negotiates.
The ordinary tier comes off per-host pricing entirely, onto OpenTelemetry collection and an open source time series database you own, running in your own account.
Traces and logs land in the Lake carrying the same trace ID, so an Agent you own follows what Dynatrace raises into everything around it, on the ordinary tier Dynatrace never saw.
Only the per-node infrastructure monitoring tier, and only with every alert rebuilt and proven to behave as it does today, tier by tier and in writing, first.
The letters mark where each verb acts in the drawing above
03The approach
Scope the depth, own the rest
The estate splits into the few hosts that need causal tracing and the many that need basic checks, and only one of those tiers should be rented.
We inventory the estate against what each tier actually consumes: which applications use the deep instrumentation, which hosts only ever report CPU, disk, and process checks. The ordinary tier moves to the open fleet with alert parity in writing. The deep tier stays, smaller and defensible.
What you own after: collection, alerts, and dashboards on the ordinary tier as code in your repositories, a Lake that holds the history, and a Dynatrace contract scoped to the work only Dynatrace can do.
04Questions
Asked about Dynatrace estates
Why not replace Dynatrace entirely?
Because on the right services its causal analysis is genuinely hard to reproduce, and pretending otherwise would cost you real capability. The honest move is scoping it to the paths that earn its price and taking the ordinary tier off per-host pricing.
What proves the open fleet matches our current alerting?
Every monitor and alert on the hosts that move is exported, rebuilt on the open stack, and proven to fire on the same conditions, tier by tier and in writing, before licensing changes. Coverage is the phase gate, not a hope.
What does the ordinary tier run on afterwards?
The OpenTelemetry Collector under OpAMP fleet control, feeding an open source time series database you own, with alerts and dashboards as code in your repositories. No per-host or per-agent licence anywhere in that path, and no lock-in to whichever store we build on.
Start with the review
You share your diagrams, we review them with you, and you leave with your version of the Logmetry Blueprint drawn on your Dynatrace estate. No system access, no obligation.