Unified services

Dynatrace version 1.274

The service type Unified service represents services detected based on spans and is built with Cloud Native and OpenTelemetry in mind. Unified services provide agentless support for data from ingestion APIs, such as trace ingest APIs.

Unified services ingested via the ingest APIs are listed with other services and in the SmartScape® topology. After enriching your traces with topology information, relationships are mapped across your environment, providing a complete vertical and horizontal view of the topology, and easier root-cause analysis of problems.
Dynatrace calculates response time, throughput, and failure rate metrics for these services, which are available via service analysis. To learn more about unified-service metrics, see Built-in metrics.
Davis® AI analyzes for problems related to the underlying resources, with out-of-the-box baselining. Additionally, you can create custom alerts based on log information.
You can search monitored entities in Dynatrace by the span name.
You can monitor Istio services meshes.
Distributed traces, logs, and events are put into context.
You can monitor and set up alerting for automatically detected endpoints.

Before you begin

If you already use the Span service (span:service) type in your environment, we recommend migrating your instances to the Unified service type, by enabling unified-service detection.

Breaking change
Migrating to a different service type affects existing API metric queries, dashboards, and service and request names.
1. Go to Settings.
2. Select Service Detection.
3. Select Unified services for OpenTelemetry and turn on Enable Unified services.
  If you don't see this menu option, you were auto-migrated safely. Enjoy the enhanced features without any migration hassles or trade-offs.
Service and endpoint detection are based on span attribute settings. To verify your configuration, see Attribute redaction. Note that masked/blocked attributes are ignored for detection.

Service detection and naming

A Unified service is created when Dynatrace detects API-ingested spans holding the attributes in the following tables.

Technology-specific attributes are evaluated first. The first matching attribute's value defines the service name.

Endpoint detection and naming

Endpoints are automatically created and baselined for each detected span serving as an entry point holding the attributes in the following tables.

Technology-specific attributes are evaluated first. The first matching attribute's value defines the endpoint name. The endpoint name uniquely identifies one endpoint of a particular service.

Manage endpoint monitoring

You can manage endpoint metrics, such as response time, throughput, and failure rate metrics, by configuring endpoint metric collection on the environment level and overrides on the service level.

When endpoint metrics consume DDUs, changes to endpoint metric-collection settings have billing implications.

Metric key	Name and description	Unit	Aggregations	Monitoring consumption
builtin:service.request.count	Unified service request count Number of requests received by a given service. To learn how Dynatrace detects and analyzes services, see [Services](https://dt-url.net/am-services).	Count	autovalue	DDUs
builtin:service.request.failure_count	Unified service failure count Number of failed requests received by a given service. To learn how Dynatrace detects and analyzes services, see [Services](https://dt-url.net/am-services).	Count	autovalue	Host units
builtin:service.request.response_time	Unified service request response time Response time of a service measured in microseconds on the server side (server side measurements do not include e.g. proxy and networking times). Response time is the time until a response is sent to a calling application, process or other service. It does not include further asynchronous processing. To learn how Dynatrace calculates service timings, see [Service analysis timings](https://dt-url.net/service-timings).	Millisecond	autocountmaxmedianminpercentile	DDUs

To manage endpoint monitoring for all unified services in your environment

Go to Settings.
Select Service Detection.
Select Unified services endpoint metrics and turn on/off Enable endpoint metrics.

To override endpoint monitoring for a specific unified service

Go to Services.
optional On the Services page, in the Service type column, select the Unified service checkbox.
Find and select the service for which you want to configure endpoint monitoring.
On the service overview page, select More (…) > Settings.
On the Service settings page, select Endpoint metrics.
On the Unified services endpoint metrics page, turn on/off Enable endpoint metrics.

Failure detection

Failure detection rules for unified services check requests on endpoints and incoming Istio services mesh proxies. The first matching attribute's value defines the failure reason.

A request is considered successfull if span.status_code is OK or no failure detection rule matches.

Frequently asked questions

For Dynatrace to correctly correlate observability signals, the unified service must be detected based on spans. Make sure that logs contain either the trace_id or trace.id attribute.

To comply with privacy regulations, Dynatrace only stores attribute values when the related keys are not blocked. This option gives you complete flexibility in what is captured but is based on safe defaults. This means that nothing else is recorded beyond what you allow.

No. Opaque services (such as outbound Python, Rust, or Ruby third-party services) are automatically migrated to the Unified service type.

Yes, you need to review preexisting management-zone rules targeting metrics with the dimension service.name, for example, management zones based on processes or process groups. The results of a management-zone rule depend on the match between the metric's primary entity and the monitored entity in the management zone. If the primary entity of a metric does not match the monitored entity, the management-zone rule yields no results. Because unified services leverage metrics where the primary entity is adaptive, we recommend that you modify such management-zone rules to include unified services. Note that logs are not directly impacted.

In the following example, a text-based entity selector rule for an existing management zone provides access to all process groups with the aws-az-1 tag.

type("PROCESS_GROUP"),tag("aws-az-1")

To include a unified service, add another management-zone rule as follows.

type(service),fromRelationship.runsOn(type("PROCESS_GROUP"),tag("aws-az-1"))

If the issue persists, contact a Dynatrace product expert via live chat to disable unified-service detection metric ingestion for metrics where the primary entity is adaptive.