Dynatrace

Dynatrace supports native OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) ingest for traces, metrics and logs. All signals can be sent directly to Dynatrace via OTLP protobuf over HTTP using the built-in OTLP/HTTP Exporter available in the OpenTelemetry JavaScript SDK. More information on configuring your JavaScript applications to use the OTLP exporter can be found in the Dynatrace documentation.

Dynatrace OpenTelemetry Metrics Exporter for JavaScript

Warning Dynatrace supports native OpenTelemetry protocol (OTLP) ingest for traces, metrics and logs. Therefore, the proprietary Dynatrace OpenTelemetry metrics exporter is deprecated in favor of exporting via OTLP/HTTP.

The exporter is still available but after the end of 2023, no support, updates, or compatibility with newer OTel versions will be provided.

Please refer to the migration guide for instructions on how to migrate to the OTLP HTTP exporter, as well as reasoning and benefits for this transition.

For an example on how to configure the OTLP exporter in a JavaScript application, check out the JavaScript integration walk-through page in the Dynatrace documentation.

This exporter allows exporting metrics created using the OpenTelemetry SDK for JavaScript directly to Dynatrace.

It was built against OpenTelemetry SDK version 1.9.1.

More information on exporting OpenTelemetry metrics to Dynatrace can be found in the Dynatrace documentation.

Getting started

The general setup of OpenTelemetry JS is explained in the official Getting Started Guide.

Using the Metrics API is explained in the Monitor Your NodeJS Application section.

Install Dependencies

The Dynatrace OpenTelemetry exporter requires the following prerequisites:

• Node.js 14+
• NPM (8+ recommended, included with Node.js)

# Optional - update NPM
npm install --global npm

# Install the Dynatrace OpenTelemetry Metrics Exporter using NPM
npm install @dynatrace/opentelemetry-exporter-metrics

If you are using a npm version < 7, please install the @opentelemetry/api peer dependency manually.

# Install peer dependency @opentelemetry/api
npm install @opentelemetry/api

Initialize components

The Dynatrace exporter is added and set-up like this:

'use strict';

const { diag, DiagConsoleLogger, DiagLogLevel } = require('@opentelemetry/api');
const { Resource } = require('@opentelemetry/resources');
const { MeterProvider } = require('@opentelemetry/sdk-metrics');
const { configureDynatraceMetricExport } = require('@dynatrace/opentelemetry-exporter-metrics');


// optional: set up logging for OpenTelemetry
diag.setLogger(new DiagConsoleLogger(), DiagLogLevel.ALL)

// Configure a MeterProvider
const provider = new MeterProvider({
  resource: new Resource({
    'service.name': 'opentelemetry-metrics-sample-dynatrace'
  })
});

const reader = configureDynatraceMetricExport(
  // exporter configuration
  {
    prefix: 'sample', // optional
    defaultDimensions: [ // optional
      { key: 'default-dim', value: 'default-dim-value' },
    ],
    // If no OneAgent is available locally, export directly to the Dynatrace server:
    // url: 'https://myenv123.live.dynatrace.com/api/v2/metrics/ingest',
    // apiToken: '<load API token from secure location such as env or config file>'
  },
  // metric reader configuration
  {
    exportIntervalMillis: 5000
  }
);

provider.addMetricReader(reader);

const meter = provider.getMeter('opentelemetry-metrics-sample-dynatrace');

// Your SDK should be set up correctly now. You can create instruments...
const requestCounter = meter.createCounter('requests', {
  description: 'Example of a Counter'
});

const upDownCounter = meter.createUpDownCounter('test_up_down_counter', {
  description: 'Example of a UpDownCounter'
});

// ...set up attributes...
const attributes = {
  pid: process.pid.toString(),
  environment: 'staging'
};

// ... and start recording metrics:
setInterval(() => {
  requestCounter.add(Math.round(Math.random() * 1000), attributes);
  upDownCounter.add(Math.random() > 0.5 ? 1 : -1, attributes);
}, 1000);

Metrics are exported periodically, depending on the value of exportIntervalMillis set above.

A full setup is provided in our example project.

Configuration

The exporter allows for configuring the following settings by setting them in the ExporterConfig in configureDynatraceMetricExport:

Name	Type	Description
prefix	string	See Metric key prefix.
defaultDimensions	Array<Dimension>	See Default attributes
url	string	See Endpoint.
apiToken	string	See API token.
dynatraceMetadataEnrichment	boolean	See Dynatrace Metadata enrichment.
maxRetries	number	See Retries on Connection Failure.
retryDelay	number	See Retries on Connection Failure.

In addition, there are some settings that will be passed to the MetricReader. These can be set in the ReaderConfig

Name	Type	Description	Default
exportIntervalMillis	number	The interval in which metrics are exported.	60000 (60 seconds)
exportTimeoutMillis	number	The maximum timeout to wait for an export to finish.	30000 (30 seconds)

Dynatrace API Endpoint

API Endpoint and Token are optional. By default, metrics will be exported to the local OneAgent endpoint described below, if it is available.

The endpoint to which the metrics are sent is specified using the url parameter.

Given an environment ID myenv123 on Dynatrace SaaS, the metrics ingest endpoint would be https://myenv123.live.dynatrace.com/api/v2/metrics/ingest.

If a OneAgent is installed on the host, it can provide a local endpoint for providing metrics directly without the need for an API token. Depending on your environment, this feature might have to be enabled as described in the OneAgent metric API documentation first. Using the local API endpoint, the host ID and host name context are automatically added to each metric as dimensions. The default metric API endpoint exposed by the OneAgent is http://localhost:14499/metrics/ingest. If no Dynatrace API endpoint is set, the exporter will default to the local OneAgent endpoint.

Dynatrace API Token

Required only if an API endpoint is also provided.

The Dynatrace API token to be used by the exporter is specified using the apiToken parameter and could, for example, be read from an environment variable.

Creating an API token for your Dynatrace environment is described in the Dynatrace API documentation. The permission required for sending metrics is Ingest metrics (metrics.ingest) and it is recommended to limit scope to only this permission.

Metric Key Prefix

The prefix parameter specifies an optional prefix, which is prepended to each metric key, separated by a dot (<prefix>.<namespace>.<name>).

Default Attributes/Dimensions

The defaultDimensions parameter can be used to optionally specify a list of key/value pairs, which will be added as additional attributes/dimensions to all data points.

Retries on Connection Failure

The maxRetries parameter can be used to set the amount of times the exporter should retry on connection failures. By default, the exporter will retry 3 times before marking the batch as failed. This number must be greater than or equal to 0.

The retryDelay parameter can be used to set the time in milliseconds to wait until re-trying an export after a connection failure, the default is 1000ms. This number must be greater than or equal to 0.

Dynatrace Metadata Enrichment

If running on a host with a running OneAgent, the exporter will export metadata collected by the OneAgent to the Dynatrace endpoint. This typically consists of the Dynatrace host ID and process group ID. More information on the underlying feature used by the exporter can be found in the Dynatrace documentation. By default, this option is turned on.

Limitations

Histogram

OpenTelemetry Histograms are exported to Dynatrace as statistical summaries consisting of a minimum and maximum value, the total sum of all values, and the count of the values summarized. If the min and max values are not directly available on the metric data point, estimations based on the boundaries of the first and last buckets containing values are used.

Attribute type limitations

Currently, only string type attribute values are supported. Attributes with values of any other type will be dropped and not exported. If you need those values to be exported, please convert them to string type before export.