Compare Dynatrace vs OpenObserve Pricing

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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