Understanding Dynatrace Pricing: How Much Does It Really Cost?

Dynatrace pricing can feel like trying to solve a puzzle without all the pieces. You see the advertised rates on their website, but when you actually talk to sales, suddenly there's an annual minimum commitment that wasn't mentioned anywhere. The confusion is real, and it's something many teams discover only after investing significant time in evaluation.

Let's break down how Dynatrace pricing actually works, what you'll really pay, and what factors can affect your bill.

How Dynatrace Pricing Works

Dynatrace uses a consumption-based pricing model called Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS). Instead of buying specific products, you commit to an annual spending amount and then consume services from their platform based on actual usage.

Think of it like a prepaid phone plan. You commit to spending a certain amount annually, and that gives you credits to use across any of their services. The more you commit upfront, the better your unit prices become.

The Two Key Concepts: DPS and Rate Cards

Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) is your annual commitment. This is the minimum amount you agree to spend with Dynatrace each year. Dynatrace confirms there is a minimum annual commitment under DPS (amount not published on their pricing pages). Some users report ~$2,000/month minimums in practice; your terms will vary by contract and discounts (pricing, Reddit anecdote).

Rate Cards determine how much each service costs. These are the per-unit prices for different capabilities. For example:

• Full-Stack Monitoring: $0.01 per GiB-hour
• Infrastructure Monitoring: $0.04 per host-hour
• Real User Monitoring: $0.00225 per session
• Log Management: $0.20 per GiB ingested

What's a GiB-Hour?

This is where things get interesting. A GiB-hour represents monitoring 1 GiB of memory for one hour. If you have a server with 16 GiB of RAM running for 24 hours, that's:

16 GiB × 24 hours = 384 GiB-hours

At $0.01 per GiB-hour for Full-Stack Monitoring, that single server costs $3.84 per day or about $115 per month.

Breaking Down the Actual Dynatrace Costs

Let's look at what different scenarios actually cost, based on the rate card from the official website.

Small Environment Example

Say you have:

• 2 servers (8 GiB RAM each) running Kubernetes
• 1 Kubernetes cluster with 10 pods
• Basic log ingestion (50 GiB/month)
• 10,000 user sessions per month

Here's the monthly breakdown:

That's about $2,152 annually. However, based on user reports, Dynatrace often requires minimum annual commitments that can be significantly higher than actual usage for small deployments.

Medium Environment Example

For a more typical setup:

• 10 servers (16 GiB RAM average) running Kubernetes
• 3 Kubernetes clusters with 50 pods total
• Log ingestion (500 GiB/month)
• 100,000 user sessions per month
• Synthetic monitoring (50,000 checks/month)

Note: Browser clickpaths are priced at $0.0045 per synthetic action, which would cost more for multi-step flows.

That's about $22,116 annually.

Common Scenarios and Their Costs

The Single Host Trap

One Reddit user shared their frustration: "We have a single host (PHP application), a SQL server instance, and an Android and iOS app." For this minimal setup, they were quoted $20,000 annually (source).

Using the rate card, their actual consumption would be:

• 1 server (8 GiB assumed): $58.40/month (8 GiB × 730 h × $0.01/GiB-h)
• Mobile app monitoring: Variable based on sessions

The gap between actual usage and minimum commitment is substantial for small deployments.

Cloud-Native Environments

Dynatrace's hourly pricing model works well for dynamic cloud environments. If you spin up a container for 15 minutes, you're billed for 15 minutes (rounded up from any usage). This is different from some competitors who charge for the full hour or day.

For auto-scaling environments, costs can vary significantly:

• Baseline: 5 hosts, always on
• Peak: add 15 hosts for 4 hours/day
• Price used: Full-Stack Monitoring = $0.01 per GiB-hour; each host is 16 GiB → $0.16 per host-hour

Baseline: 5 hosts × 730 h/month × $0.16 ≈ $584/month
Peak add-on: 15 hosts × 4 h/day × 30 days × $0.16 ≈ $288/month
Total ≈ $872/month

Log Management at Scale

Log costs include both ingestion and retention. A moderately active application generating 100 GiB of logs daily would cost:

Ingestion: 100 GiB × 30 days × $0.20 = $600/month
Retention (30 days): 3,000 GiB × 30 days × $0.02 = $1,800/month
Total: $2,400/month for logs alone

You can choose between two retention models:

• Retain with Included Queries: $0.02 per GiB-day (queries included) - simpler but more expensive
• Usage-based: $0.0007 per GiB-day retention + $0.0035 per GiB scanned - cheaper if you query selectively

Factors That Affect Your Dynatrace Bill

Memory Rounding

Here's something that catches many teams off guard: Dynatrace rounds up memory in quarter-GiB increments. If your host has 3.1 GiB of memory, you're paying for 3.25 GiB. Got a tiny server with 2 GiB? You're still paying for the 4 GiB minimum (unless you're using Application-Only Mode).

This means a 3 GiB server costs exactly the same as a 4 GiB server. If you're spinning up cloud instances, might as well get that extra gigabyte of RAM, it's already on your bill.

Time Rounding

Short-lived resources get interesting billing treatment. Everything under an hour is rounded up to the nearest 15-minute increment. Spin up a container for debugging that runs for just 1 minute? That's 15 minutes on your bill. Run something for 1 hour and 3 minutes? You're paying for 1.25 hours.

For ephemeral workloads, batch your work into these 15-minute windows when possible. Three separate 5-minute debug sessions cost you 45 minutes total, but running them back-to-back in one session costs just 15 minutes.

Container Density (The Good News)

Here's where Dynatrace actually shines compared to some competitors: they don't care how many containers you pack onto a host. Running 50 microservices on one beefy server? Same price as running a single monolith, as long as the total memory is the same.

This is huge for Kubernetes environments where you might have dozens of pods per node. You're incentivized to optimize for actual resource usage, not artificial container limits.

Volume Discounts

Larger commitments unlock better unit prices. Think of it like buying in bulk at Costco, the more you commit upfront, the less you pay per unit. The exact discount tiers vary by negotiation, but significant annual commitments can meaningfully reduce your per-host costs.

Multiple Dynatrace Pricing Models

If Full-Stack Monitoring feels like overkill, Dynatrace offers lighter options:

Infrastructure Monitoring Only: $0.04 per host-hour (flat rate regardless of size). Perfect if you just need basic metrics and don't care about APM traces or code-level insights.

Kubernetes Platform Monitoring: $0.002 per pod-hour. This gives you container metrics, Kubernetes events, and basic observability without the full APM stack.

Application Security: Adds $0.00225 per GiB-hour on top of your existing monitoring. If you're already paying for Full-Stack, this is the incremental cost for vulnerability detection and runtime protection.

For teams not needing full APM capabilities, Infrastructure Monitoring at $0.04/hour for any size host can be more economical. A 64 GiB server would cost about $29/month versus $467/month with Full-Stack Monitoring.

Making Sense of It All

Dynatrace's pricing model makes sense for organizations that:

• Have substantial monitoring needs across multiple capabilities
• Want flexibility to shift between different monitoring types
• Operate in dynamic cloud environments with variable workloads
• Can meet the minimum annual commitment

For smaller teams or simpler monitoring needs, the minimum commitment can be a significant barrier. The gap between advertised per-unit pricing and the actual minimum spend catches many teams off guard.

The platform provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities, and the hourly billing model offers genuine flexibility for cloud-native workloads. However, understanding the true cost requires looking beyond the rate card to factor in minimum commitments and your actual usage patterns.

SigNoz - An Alternative to Dynatrace with Transparent Pricing

If the complexity of Dynatrace's pricing model and minimum commitments have you looking for alternatives, SigNoz offers a different approach to observability pricing that many teams find refreshing.

SigNoz is built on OpenTelemetry from the ground up, not retrofitted to support it. This means you're working with industry-standard instrumentation that won't lock you into a proprietary agent. Your telemetry data remains portable, and you can switch vendors or run multiple backends without changing your instrumentation.

A Simpler Pricing Model

SigNoz uses straightforward usage-based pricing without hidden minimums. You start at $49/month (which includes $49 worth of usage), then pay only for what you consume:

• Logs and traces: $0.30 per GB ingested
• Metrics: $0.10 per million samples

No per-host pricing that penalizes you for having smaller servers. No memory-based calculations. No rounding up to the nearest quarter-GiB. Just simple volume-based pricing.

Same Small Environment, Different Cost

Remember our small environment example from earlier? The one that would cost $179/month in usage but require a $20,000 annual commitment with Dynatrace? Here's how it looks with SigNoz:

• 2 servers generating ~20GB of traces/month: $6
• 50GB of logs/month: $15
• Metrics from 10 pods (~5M samples/month): $0.50
• Total: $21.50/month (covered by the $49 base plan)

No surprises. No sales calls to discover a minimum commitment. What you see is what you get.

Get Started with SigNoz

You can choose between various deployment options in SigNoz. The easiest way to get started with SigNoz is SigNoz cloud. We offer a 30-day free trial account with access to all features.

Those who have data privacy concerns and can't send their data outside their infrastructure can sign up for either enterprise self-hosted or BYOC offering.

Those who have the expertise to manage SigNoz themselves or just want to start with a free self-hosted option can use our community edition.

Conclusion

Dynatrace provides a comprehensive observability platform with sophisticated capabilities and flexible consumption-based billing. For organizations that can meet the minimum commitments and need its full feature set, it can be a solid choice. The hourly billing model works particularly well for dynamic cloud environments.

However, the gap between advertised per-unit pricing and actual minimum commitments creates a significant barrier for smaller teams. If you're looking for enterprise-grade observability without the enterprise-sized commitment, exploring alternatives like SigNoz might save you both money and complexity.

The key is understanding your actual monitoring needs, growth trajectory, and budget constraints before making a commitment. Whether you choose Dynatrace, SigNoz, or another solution, make sure the pricing model aligns with your team's size and monitoring requirements.

Hope we answered all your questions regarding Dynatrace pricing. If you have more questions, feel free to use the SigNoz AI chatbot, or join our slack community.

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