Connect OpenTelemetry signals end-to-end with Dynatrace

OpenTelemetry standardizes how organizations collect traces, metrics, and logs. Dynatrace adds the topology and context needed to connect that telemetry across user experiences, services, databases, hosts, and AI workloads. This connected context means you can spend less time trying to understand your environment and more time on the work that drives business outcomes.

OpenTelemetry's graduation from the CNCF marks a major milestone in the standardization of observability. Backed by years of community-driven development, OpenTelemetry has become the common framework for collecting and describing telemetry across modern environments at organizations of all sizes, regardless of which observability platform they use.

Enrich OpenTelemetry data with automated context at scale

Dynatrace Observability supports OpenTelemetry data in a unified platform, bringing analytics, topology, and infrastructure into a unified experience:

• Frontend-to-backend linking: trace a user journey from a click in the browser or mobile app to the responsible backend service, end to end.
• Cloud-Native Service Map and Smartscape: See how services, databases, and queues connect, with topology and live health signals in one view.
• Host and process monitoring through the OpenTelemetry Collector: Monitor infrastructure health with correlated logs, and alert templates in the Infrastructure & Operations app.
• Connected AI workflows: Map models, agents, and AI services alongside the rest of the stack to trace requests and troubleshoot AI-driven applications in context.

Together, these capabilities give teams the context they need to move fast: from identifying problems in the user session to tracing them across services and host to pinpoint the root cause.

Follow requests from the frontend to backend-and back

When a browser or mobile action is slow, developers shouldn't have to stitch together a session, a trace, and backend data by hand. Dynatrace helps teams follow the path from the user action to the backend service, and then to the cloud database or dependency involved.

Dynatrace frontend monitoring for web, mobile, and cross-platform applications connects directly to OpenTelemetry-instrumented backends through standard traceparent and tracestate propagation, with no additional instrumentation required across the backend chain. Teams can follow a user session from the initial interaction to the OpenTelemetry service responsible for the experience.

Dynatrace connects frontend monitoring with backend traces when the required trace context is propagated. You can start in User Events and Sessions, jump to the related trace in Distributed Tracing, and see which service handled the request. You can also start from a backend span and navigate back to the user action that triggered it.

That gives developers and SREs a practical troubleshooting path: start where the symptom appears, follow the request through the service chain, and verify whether the issue sits in the frontend, a backend service, or a downstream dependency.

Extend OpenTelemetry to infrastructure monitoring

The frontend is only one part of the stack. For teams already running the OTel Collectors on their hosts, Dynatrace brings host and process visibility into the Infrastructure & Operations app with correlated logs and alert templates. Infrastructure entities are automatically connected into Smartscape, helping teams quickly determine whether an issue originates in the application or the underlying infrastructure layer. This works with any OTel Collector distribution that includes the host metrics receiver and resource detection processor.

Automatically visualize OpenTelemetry application topology

The Cloud-Native Service Map is a single-screen, interactive topology view - continuously discovering runtime connections for your services: upstream and downstream services, database queries, and messaging flows. Live health and performance data overlays on the same view, so teams can navigate from a high-level dependency map to root cause analysis without switching context.

The Dynatrace Service Map helps teams see how services and databases interact with health and performance data available directly where the problems occur.

Smartscape places those OpenTelemetry entities within the broader, real-time topology of the environment, connecting frontend applications, backend services, and infrastructure. It treats OneAgent and OpenTelemetry as equals, so OTel-instrumented services show up on the map with the same depth as OneAgent-based ones.

Automatically visualize OpenTelemetry application topology

The cloud-native Service Map is a single-screen, interactive topology view - continuously discovering runtime connections for your services: upstream and downstream services, database queries, and messaging flows. Live health and performance data overlays on the same view, so teams can navigate from a high-level dependency map to root cause analysis without switching context.

The Dynatrace Service Map helps teams see how services and databases interact with health and performance data available directly where the problems occur.

Smartscape places those OpenTelemetry entities within the broader, real-time topology of the environment, connecting frontend applications, backend services, and infrastructure. It treats OneAgent and OpenTelemetry as equals, so OTel-instrumented services show up on the map with the same depth as OneAgent-based ones.

Together, they turn OpenTelemetry signals into a connected view of the environment, helping teams identify an unhealthy dependency and understand its wider impact across the environment.

All of this is built automatically from OpenTelemetry data, with no manual entity modeling required, including service-to-database connection mapping. Rather than relying solely on tag-based labels, Dynatrace identifies the actual dependency of relationships between entities.

Observe AI workflows in context

As AI workloads move into production, observability is evolving to capture a new class of telemetry for models, agents, and AI-driven services. Community-driven efforts such as OpenInference and OpenLLMetry, which are part of the OpenTelemetry project, are helping establish a common standard for AI observability.

Dynatrace can map supported AI telemetry into Smartscape, including AI-related entities such as models, agents, and agent services, so teams can analyze how AI components interact with traditional services. Teams can also use captured production prompts and telemetry as inputs for online evaluations of AI output quality, safety, and performance, subject to the capabilities and configuration in use.

Unify OpenTelemetry across the stack

Dynatrace connects OpenTelemetry across the stack, whether the telemetry signals come from OTel, OneAgent, or a mix of both. This brings together frontend experiences, backend services, infrastructure, and AI workflows in a single connected platform. OpenTelemetry signals are automatically enriched with the context needed to understand dependencies, accelerate troubleshooting, and optimize performance.

The Service Map, frontend-to-backend linking, and host monitoring via OTel Collector are available for Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) customers.

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