As onboarding and deployment become faster, self-service and automation have become a requirement; more than ever before, costs must remain predictable, attributable, and easy to report.

If you’re working to make log spend visible and fair across teams, you’re not alone—this is a common challenge in modern, and cloud native environments.

Assign cost centers and products

Dynatrace allows precise cost allocation for logs, so you can attribute log ingestion and retention to the right cost centers and cost products. This makes internal showback and chargeback straightforward.

Why this matters

• Cloud-native apps and microservices generate log sources rapidly, while shared platforms can blur ownership. Cost allocation brings clarity.
• Teams want autonomy and instant access, without surprises. Build accountability and trust with simplified and automated cost attribution.
• Service providers require accurate reporting for budgeting, audits, and governance purposes. Cost allocation makes it predictable and repeatable, with more than 60,000 cost allocation combinations out of the box and more available for our large enterprise customers, who are adopting this feature today at scale.

Cost optimization is a team sport

The era of budgets and cost optimization being a concern solely left to finance departments is a thing of the past. Teams are expected to own their budgets. Meaning that cost optimization is not a separate accounting artifact, but rather a shared accountability that each team is expected to contribute to.

Whether your teams offer services, applications, or infrastructure, they will want to leverage logs. Team-level accountability for log management begins with allocating log spend to individual products, owners, or any other method your FinOps practice uses for tracking.

With cost allocation for logs, you can take the non-disruptive route

You can leverage the established and defined annotations and labels of the source, for instance, directly from Kubernetes.

But there might be reasons you want to make that attribution at the processing stage:

• Your source might not be capable of providing annotations and tags.
• You don’t have the resources to configure each source individually to match attribution.
• You might want to take a centralized approach, rather than contacting each team individually.
• Your cost allocation requirements are too complex and require a script or a processing technology.

In Dynatrace OpenPipeline®, you can enrich your logs during processing. What may be tedious manual work elsewhere is now centralized and automated.

Whatever your requirements and expectations are, whether you need simple tagging or complex attribution rules, OpenPipeline is here to help.

Because cost optimization is a team sport, the output aligns perfectly with the most common FinOps formats, providing the exact granularity necessary to support enterprise-wide optimization initiatives.

What’s new with cost allocation

• Billing usage events for logs can now be enriched with dt.cost.costcenter and dt.cost.product.
• Attribution of cost centers and products should best take place at source, but can be dynamically processed with OpenPipeline.
• You can mix and match both attributes or use them individually. This allows you to allocate costs by business unit and product/service, allowing for granular chargeback and showback.

Example: Chargeback and showback with Dynatrace cost attributes

Many organizations use chargebacks to create accountability and transparency for shared costs by charging internal departments for the resources or services they consume, based on actual usage. An effective way to implement this with Dynatrace is to use the dt.cost.costcenter and dt.cost.product attributes together.

Consider a scenario where a central IT team provides observability services to multiple business units, such as Retail, Corporate Banking, and Wealth Management. Each unit runs several applications that generate logs through ingestion channels, such as OneAgent®, Log Ingest API, or OpenTelemetry integrations. To ensure accurate cost attribution, the IT team configures these log sources to automatically enrich each log with the appropriate cost center and product identifiers.

For example, logs generated by the Retail unit’s mobile banking app are enriched with dt.cost.costcenter: retail and dt.cost.product: mobile-app. This dual-tagging approach allows the central IT team to allocate log-related costs to the correct business unit and break down those costs by specific products or services within that unit. When billing usage events are enriched with these attributes, Finance teams can apply direct chargeback methods.

Optimize log spend with granular showback

Using the same attribution, IT teams can generate detailed reports showing how much each cost center is spending on log ingestion and retention, as well as which products drive that spend. These reports can be flexibly incorporated with other costs attributed to the same owners or products, such as query costs, using Lookup data in Grail®.

Now consider that same Retail unit. The granular attribution shows that the mobile app is responsible for 70% of its log spend. The team can now take targeted actions. For instance, it can reduce log verbosity in non-critical flows or adjust retention policies to optimize costs.

Meanwhile, central IT maintains full transparency and control over the shared observability platform. This centrally operated, data-driven chargeback model allows teams to operate autonomously without disruption, while aligning with FinOps principles.

Getting to the numbers

You can report and analyze cost allocation in multiple ways, depending on your audience, business requirements, workflows, and the tools you have.

• Dashboards: Crafting individual dashboards to visualize log ingestion and retention by cost center and product is one of Dynatrace’s key strengths. Individual filters, views, and visuals allow you to slice and dice custom dashboards for your teams.
• Notebooks: Explore and validate enriched billing usage events alongside Grail data for deeper analysis or ad‑hoc investigations. This route allows admins to align consumption data with log query insights of users in a shareable manner, as the results are stored. Non-admin users can view the results this way when the Notebook is shared with them.
• Account Management portal: Create cost management reports to track accrued costs and perform showback/chargeback at scale across business units and products, sent by email and downloadable in CSV format.
• Lookup data: Some organizations may prefer using lookup tables to allocate costs to their owners or products. This is a good fit for customers who already work with organizational structures that link owners with product and their respective cost centers. It can also serve as an additional support to track queries in your environments. Learn more about Lookup data in Grail.

With these views, IT and Finance can align on the same source of truth, driving targeted optimizations such as adjusting log verbosity in non-critical flows or tuning retention policies, while maintaining shared platform governance.

Get started: a guide for cost allocation

Let’s recap the best practices to get started successfully:

1. Inventory your log ingest channels and sources (OneAgent, API, OpenTelemetry, cloud/hyperscaler forwarders, log shippers).
2. Define attributes and assign labels for dt.cost.costcenter and dt.cost.product at the source before ingestion, for example, in Kubernetes, OneAgent, or the API and OpenTelemetry configuration of your apps and services.
3. If updating agents or code changes aren’t feasible, define OpenPipeline rules to enrich during the process.
4. Send sample data, verify attributes configured in Grail, and confirm visibility using the Logs app or your existing dashboards.
5. Iterate by team/product, expand coverage, and standardize reporting in the Account Management portal.

New to Log Management & Analytics in Dynatrace?

Ready to make log costs clear, fair, and easy to report? Define your attributes, turn on enrichment, and give your teams the accountability and insights they need—without slowing them down.

If you’re already using Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS), you can instantly get started with logs today! Additional resources and downloads are available in our community examples space on GitHub.

We invite you to explore our Dynatrace Playground tenant at no cost or to start a free trial to ingest your first logs with cost allocation.

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Managing a Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) budget requires balancing your organization’s usage of Dynatrace capabilities against a pre-defined annual budget commitment. Without adequate flexibility in the subscription model, your organization might fail to benefit from capabilities that could transform your observability and security processes. Conversely, with too much flexibility, costs may exceed your budget.

Subscription administrators typically limit team access and capability usage to avoid billing surprises. This approach is time-consuming and requires ongoing management. Also, if limits are set too low, some critical components in your infrastructure might go unmonitored, potentially negatively impacting your business. While if limits are set too high, you might pay for more monitoring than you need and exceed your budget. While there is no penalty for exceeding your DPS budget (the same rate card is applied for on-demand usage without additional fees or premium pricing), administrators need the ability to manage their subscriptions within a planned budget.

Cost monitors notify you of changes to your forecast usage

Cost monitors offer a different approach to these challenges. By using predictive AI with smart forecast algorithms that predict usage, you’re notified whenever forecasted usage is projected to exceed your defined budget or when unexpected usage spikes occur.

Cost monitors run in the background daily, automatically monitoring usage forecasts and costs. They notify you when unusual forecasts and cost events occur so you can focus on monitoring your applications, not your subscription. Cost monitors automatically notify subscription administrators without manual setup or configuration. However, you retain full control over configured thresholds and notification paths if you desire to change them. They even provide APIs so you can integrate them into your monitoring ecosystem as needed.

Smart forecasting capabilities

Cost monitors leverage the smart forecasting capabilities of the Dynatrace Platform Subscription to predict your costs through the end of your subscription period. The budget summary includes a median forecast value with an upper and lower range for each day of your subscription into the future. By monitoring the forecast cost for the end of your subscription, you can proactively plan for growth and be notified of spikes in usage to stay on top of daily spending. Usage is forecast daily and you’re notified of significant changes or forecasts that exceed your defined threshold values. This allows you to plan and make changes accordingly.

Cost monitors also track daily costs at the capability and environment levels, alerting you when daily costs exceed predicted levels. There are no thresholds to manage for cost events; cost monitors are designed to ensure that all meaningful increases are caught and notified without generating false alerts. This predictive AI technique allows you to stay on top of daily costs and be notified of unexpected cost increases.

Cost monitors also generate email notifications for specified recipients when forecast and cost events occur. By default, you are notified of all forecast and cost events. License administrators can additionally define a specific email distribution list for these notifications. This approach ensures that a responsible team member is notified about all subscription-relevant events without any upfront configuration. Proactive alerting can be used to draw attention to unusual usage in non-production environments or an unexpected increase in use for a specific capability, allowing you to plan or manage accordingly.

What’s next

Dynatrace will continue to monitor and fine-tune the cost-event detection algorithms used by cost monitors to ensure that notifications are accurate.

If you’re already using the new Dynatrace Platform Subscription model (available as of April 26, 2023), cost monitors are already running on your account! For full details on how to get the most from them, please see our Cost monitor documentation.

Additional information about the Dynatrace Platform Subscription model is also available in our DPS documentation. If you’re interested in migrating to a Dynatrace Platform Subscription, please contact a Dynatrace account representative.

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