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
Infrastructure-only hosts
hosts
Kubernetes pods (non-FSM hosts)
pods
Log Analytics (Grail)
Log ingestion volume
TB / mo
Traces & Metrics
Trace volume
TB / mo
Custom metric datapoints (on top of host metrics)
/ 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 — no per-host, per-pod or per-session meters. You pay for the volume your hosts actually emit.
Logs
5TB
Traces
2.5TB
Metrics
85.1GB
RUM
15.4GB
Query scan
1TB
You save
81% lower than Dynatrace$190,055.76/yr
Cost breakdown by meter group
The same workload, side by side: Dynatrace stacks a per-host meter on top of every signal; OpenObserve bills one rate on the data itself.
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.
Log retention is billed by the GiB-day
Logs sit outside the Full-Stack allowance entirely — they're billed at $0.20/GiB ingest plus $0.02/GiB-day retention (Dynatrace caps 'retain with included queries' at 10–35 days). Log retention alone on 5 TB for 30 days is $3,000/mo, and it scales linearly with both volume and window.
The host allowance hides the real cost
Full-Stack Monitoring bundles a generous metrics + traces allowance (≈2.6M datapoints and ≈9 GB of traces per GiB of host memory per month), so those lines can read $0. But you pay for that bundle through the $0.01/memory-GiB-hour host meter — which is the single largest line on the bill. The 'free' metrics aren't free; they're prepaid per host.
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 the per-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 Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) rate card the way Dynatrace actually bills it. Full-Stack Monitoring is $0.01/memory-GiB-hour (RAM rounded up to 0.25 GiB, 4 GiB floor) — and critically, each GiB of monitored memory bundles an allowance of ~2.6M metric datapoints and ~9 GB of traces per month, so metrics and traces bill $0 until you exceed that allowance; only the excess is charged ($0.15/100K datapoints, $0.20/GiB). Logs have no allowance: $0.20/GiB ingest + $0.02/GiB-day retention (clamped 10–35 days) + $0.0035/GiB scanned for queries. Infrastructure-only hosts bill at $0.04/host-hour with no allowance; Kubernetes at $0.002/pod-hour; RUM per session; automation at $0.03/workflow-hour. An optional 10% Enterprise Support surcharge applies to the subtotal. Synthetic monitoring is excluded (see below).
How is the OpenObserve estimate calculated? +
OpenObserve Cloud charges a flat $0.50/GB on ingested volume, and $0.01/GB scanned for queries. We bill the full log and trace volume plus your metric and RUM volume (datapoints and sessions converted to GB) — no allowance is carved out, because OpenObserve doesn't bundle telemetry into a host fee. Retention, hosts, pods and per-session fees are all included in the $0.50/GB rate.
Why is the flat rate so much lower? +
Dynatrace's largest line is the per-host Full-Stack meter ($0.01/memory-GiB-hour), which you pay whether or not you use the metrics and traces it bundles. OpenObserve has no per-host meter at all — it bills only the data you send, at one rate. So even though OpenObserve bills metrics and traces in full (Dynatrace often shows them as $0 because they're prepaid inside the host meter), the total is far lower because you're not paying a memory-GiB-hour tax on every host on top.
Does OpenObserve cost stay flat as I add hosts? +
No — and we don't claim it does. More hosts emit more metrics, traces and logs, and OpenObserve bills every GB of that. So as you scale hosts, raise the metric/trace/log volumes in the calculator and the OpenObserve total rises with them. The difference is what you're paying for: OpenObserve charges for the data a host actually emits, while Dynatrace charges a memory-GiB-hour fee per host on top of the data. OpenObserve scales with data; Dynatrace scales with hosts and data.
How do allowances, retention and RUM get modeled exactly? +
We follow the DPS rules meter by meter. Metrics: the Full-Stack allowance is 900 datapoints per GiB of host memory per 15-minute interval (plus 1,500 per infrastructure-only host per interval), granted per interval with no monthly rollover; only the excess is billed at $0.15/100K, and that excess is also retained at $0.0007/GiB-day. Traces: the allowance is a peak-throughput cap (200 KiB/GiB/minute, held by Adaptive Traffic Management), not a monthly bucket — we compare your peak trace rate against it and bill only sustained overage, plus retention on stored volume. RUM: every session is billed at $0.00225, and Session Replay adds $0.0045 on top of the sessions that capture replay. Logs are billed in full (no allowance): $0.20/GiB ingest + $0.02/GiB-day retention, clamped to 10–35 days.
Why do hosts move the OpenObserve total but not equally on both sides? +
Host-emitted metrics scale OpenObserve volume with host count, because Dynatrace's own 900 DP/GiB rate tells us what a host emits — that's a grounded number. We deliberately do not scale traces or logs from host count: the trace allowance is a peak-rate ceiling (not a typical volume), and logs have no per-host formula, so forcing either would be guesswork. Metrics are coupled; traces and logs stay tied to the volumes you enter.
What isn't included in this comparison? +
This tool models the meters most teams actually pay for: Full-Stack and Infrastructure hosts, Kubernetes, logs, traces, metrics, RUM, automation and query scan. It does not model every DPS capability — Application Security, Data Egress, AppEngine Functions, Mainframe/MSU and Events ingest are out of scope, and synthetics are excluded until OpenObserve publishes pricing. A real Dynatrace bill that uses those capabilities will carry additional lines this estimate can't show.
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.