Compare Dynatrace vs OpenObserve Pricing
Dynatrace bills every meter separately — memory-GiB-hours, pod-hours, GiB-days of retention, per-session, even idle workflow-hours. Adjust the inputs below to rebuild your DPS bill, then see the flat-rate alternative.
Dynatrace
Your Dynatrace DPS bill
Every consumption meter, priced by the 2026 DPS rate card. Edit any value or drag a slider.
Compute / Host Observability
Full-Stack hosts
hosts
Avg RAM per host
GiB
Kubernetes pods (non-FSM hosts)
pods
Log Analytics (Grail)
Log ingestion volume
TB / mo
Traces & Metrics
APM / trace ingestion volume
TB / mo
Custom metric datapoints
/ mo
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
RUM base sessions
/ mo
Automation & Queries
Active / idle workflows
workflows
Data scanned via queries
TB / mo
OpenObserve
What you'd pay OpenObserve
One flat rate on the data you ingest. Everything is searchable, nothing is metered per host.
Logs
5TB
Traces
2.5TB
Metrics
1GB
RUM
15.4GB
Query scan
1TB
You save
81% lower than Dynatrace$194,190.24/yr
Cost breakdown by meter group
The same workload, side by side: Dynatrace stacks every meter, OpenObserve stays flat.
Why the flat rate wins
One rate, every signal
Logs, traces, metrics and RUM all ingest at the same $0.50/GB. No memory-GiB-hour meter, no per-pod-hour, no per-session tax.
Retention isn't a separate meter
Dynatrace Grail charges $0.02 per GiB-day just to keep logs — 30 days of 5 TB alone is thousands of dollars. OpenObserve retention is included in the ingest rate.
Open source & self-hostable
Native OpenTelemetry and Prometheus support. Run OpenObserve on your own infrastructure or use OpenObserve Cloud — your data, your call.
FinOps cost traps in the DPS model
Small changes to your environment move the Dynatrace bill non-linearly. The flat-rate model doesn't have these edges.
Host RAM is a multiplier, not a line item
Full-Stack Monitoring meters at $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour. Doubling average host RAM from 16 to 32 GiB doubles the single largest meter on the bill — and RAM is rounded up to the nearest 0.25 GiB with a hard 4 GiB floor per host, so tiny hosts still bill for 4 GiB.
Idle workflows bill around the clock
Automation workflows meter at $0.03 per workflow-hour from creation — whether or not they ever execute. Ten idle workflows quietly add $219/mo; a hundred adds $2,190/mo for automations that may run once a week.
Retention compounds with volume and window
Log retention is [volume] × [days] × $0.02/GiB-day. Growing from 30 to 90 days triples that meter; growing volume scales it linearly on top. The retention meter can dwarf the ingest meter.
Query scan meters differ by 3×
Dynatrace Grail ad-hoc queries bill at $0.0035 per GiB scanned; OpenObserve Cloud query scan is $0.01 per GiB. On the query meter alone Grail is cheaper per GiB — but it sits on top of ingest, retention and every host meter, so total spend still lands far higher. Watch this line if your teams run heavy exploratory queries.
Cut your observability spend.
Here's how
Move off Dynatrace's DPU billing to a single flat rate with comparable full-stack coverage — logs, traces, metrics and RUM.
Frequently asked questions
How is the Dynatrace estimate calculated? +
We apply the 2026 Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) public rate card meter by meter: Full-Stack Monitoring at $0.01/memory-GiB-hour (RAM rounded to 0.25 GiB, 4 GiB floor), Kubernetes at $0.002/pod-hour, log ingest at $0.20/GiB, log retention at $0.02/GiB-day, Grail queries at $0.0035/GiB, trace ingest at $0.20/GiB, custom metrics at $0.15/100K datapoints, RUM sessions, and automation at $0.03/workflow-hour. An optional 10% Enterprise Support surcharge is applied to the subtotal. Synthetic monitoring is excluded from the comparison (see below).
How is the OpenObserve estimate calculated? +
OpenObserve Cloud charges a flat $0.50/GB on ingested volume. We combine your log and trace volume with an estimate of your metric and RUM volume (custom-metric datapoints and RUM sessions converted to GB), and add query scan at $0.01/GB. Retention, hosts, pods and per-session fees are all included in the ingest rate.
Why is the flat rate so much lower? +
Dynatrace bills many independent meters that each scale with a different dimension — host RAM, pod count, retention window, sessions, and idle workflows. OpenObserve bills one dimension: data volume. As your environment grows, the number of DPS meters compounds while the flat rate stays proportional to the data you actually keep.
What about synthetic monitoring? +
Synthetics are excluded from this comparison. OpenObserve is introducing synthetic monitoring soon, so to keep the numbers honest we neither bill synthetics on the Dynatrace side nor count them as OpenObserve volume. We'll add them once OpenObserve synthetics pricing is available.
Do I need an account or credit card to use this? +
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, and no signup or email is required to see your estimate.