OpenTelemetry instrumentation gives organizations flexibility in how they collect telemetry. Getting value from that investment depends on what happens next: how effectively teams can manage growing volumes of data and turn that telemetry into reliable answers.
As AI becomes part of software delivery and operations, teams and AI agents need context around the telemetry they receive to understand what happened and decide what to do next. Dynatrace adds that context through its real-time dependency graph and causal AI, and it now extends root-cause analysis to OpenTelemetry-instrumented services.
Control your telemetry
As telemetry volumes grow, teams need control over what they collect, how they process it, and where they send it. Telemetry pipelines let teams filter, mask, enrich, and route data before analysis, helping reduce unnecessary volume, protect sensitive information, and preserve the signals that matter. Centralized collector management helps apply those policies consistently across environments.
Dynatrace brings all of this together. Its OTel-Native Telemetry Pipeline helps you automate and manage telemetry collection and processing at scale to optimize cost, maximize value from data and better manage your compliance needs.
Unify your data and preserve its context
Even well-managed telemetry becomes harder to use when logs, metrics, and traces are fragmented across separate storage systems. Bringing OpenTelemetry data together in a unified data lakehouse like Dynatrace Grail keeps signals accessible for analysis and makes it easier to investigate across telemetry types.
But having the data in one place is only part of the equation. Understanding system behavior also requires context: how services connect and what they depend on. Smartscape topology maps those relationships automatically. Preserving them helps teams see how an issue moves across the environment and provides the context needed to understand where it started.
Understand your data with AI-powered root cause analysis
With data managed well and stored in context, teams can put it to work across the software development lifecycle—from identifying issues during testing and validating releases to resolving problems in production. Dynatrace Causal AI, part of Dynatrace Intelligence, helps pinpoint the root cause across OpenTelemetry services, frontends, and databases. When several services in a chain degrade together, their anomalies are merged into a single Problem that identifies the root cause, instead of leaving teams with separate problems across affected services.
This works from a monitored web or mobile frontend, through OpenTelemetry services, to the databases they call, including cloud databases and databases monitored with a Dynatrace extension. Causal AI follows Smartscape topology on Grail data using the actual relationships between affected components to determine where a problem originates. This gives teams a root cause grounded in how their environment is connected, rather than another signal to investigate.
The result is less noise, faster root cause identification, and less time spent triaging affected services. OpenTelemetry services can themselves be identified as the root cause, while a monitored and alerting database instance can also be named as the root cause.
Put trusted insights to work with agentic AI
Root cause analysis gives AI workflows structured information about impact, origin, and causal relationships. As organizations adopt agentic AI, agents need reliable evidence about what happened, which systems are affected, and why. Whether supporting remediation, resilience testing, or software delivery, understanding cause-and effect relationships helps an agent decide which actions to take and how to evaluate the results.
Root cause information can provide agents with structured context about impact, an identified root cause, and the observed causal path. Agent behavior, recommendations, and actions depend on the agent implementation, permissions, and available data.
Root cause analysis drives smarter operations
The OpenTelemetry project gives teams the flexibility to instrument their applications with open standards. With Causal AI extending root cause analysis to OpenTelemetry-instrumented services, teams can trace an incident from affected services to the identified root cause and see how its impact spread. That same context gives AI workflows what they need to act on the problem and evaluate the results.
Get started with OpenTelemetry and Dynatrace
Ready to put your OpenTelemetry data to work? Follow our getting started guide to connect your applications and configure telemetry ingestion.
New to Dynatrace? Start a free trial. Share your questions and feedback in the Dynatrace Community.
At KubeCon in Salt Lake City this week? Stop by the Dynatrace booth to meet the team and see how we help turn OpenTelemetry signals into answers and action.
