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Audit domain · 12 checks

Dynatrace cost audit: where the licence money actually goes

Twelve checks that reconcile what you are billed for against what is being monitored — host units sitting on machines with nothing to watch, storage nobody chose, and consumption no team can be charged for.
Book a free audit All 71 checks

What these checks read

Host units against monitored services

Every Full-Stack host is priced whether or not a service runs on it. The check lists hosts carrying Full-Stack consumption with no monitored process group behind them.

Storage retention against defaults

Bucket retention is easy to set and easy to forget. Each bucket is priced at its own retention against your rate card, annualised.

Cost-allocation tagging

Consumption you cannot attribute to a team cannot be charged back, and cannot be argued about. The check counts the hosts and services missing the tags your own convention defines.

Idle and dormant entities

RUM applications with no traffic, synthetic monitors that never run, process groups that stopped reporting — each one still occupies licence and configuration.

Why it matters

Dynatrace bills on consumption, and consumption is a product of configuration. That is the whole reason a cost problem is a configuration problem: nobody decided to spend $91,576 a year watching hosts with nothing on them — a rollout script did, two years ago, and no report since has been shaped to show it.
The FinOps domain is the part of the audit that reconciles the two. Every check produces the entity list behind its number, priced on your negotiated rate card rather than list price, and annualised. A finding you cannot verify is not evidence, so each one ships with the DQL that produced it: run it yourself, next quarter, without us.
What we do not do is net a saving against a cost. If a check finds spend that is recoverable, that figure stands on its own; if another check argues for more retention, that cost is stated separately. Netting them is how a report ends up promising a saving the invoice never shows.
A finding from a real tenant
Full-Stack hosts with no monitored service
Scale
140 hosts
Impact
$91,576 / year
Every finding ships with the source behind it and a CSV of the objects it found, so your team can re-run the check without us.

Questions we get about this domain

Can a Dynatrace audit reduce my licence cost?

Sometimes substantially, but only where the configuration is paying for something nobody watches. On the tenant in our case study the recoverable annual spend was $114,000–178,000 across all domains, and the single largest line was Full-Stack host units on machines with no monitored service. The audit tells you which lines those are and what each is worth; the decision to reclaim them stays yours.

Do you need write access to audit our costs?

No. Every FinOps check is a read: the Settings API, the entity model and DQL queries against Grail. The audit has never performed a write operation on a customer tenant, and the report says so per check.

The other audit domains

Nineteen domains, 71 checks, one read-only run. Each domain is a page.
FinOps Where the money goes, and what is recoverable Kubernetes Cluster coverage, versions, recurring failures Alerting Whether an incident would actually reach a human Audit log Who changed what, when, and outside business hours Coverage What is monitored, what only looks monitored RUM Real-user monitoring reach and privacy settings Grail Buckets, retention, annualized storage cost Pipelines Ingest processing, masking, drop rules Synthetic Synthetic monitors that pass, fail, or never run Topology Entity detection quality and entity explosion OpenTelemetry OTel sources and dual instrumentation Security Token scopes, expiry, dormant credentials Workflows Automation that fails or never fires Bizevents Business event provider hygiene Dashboards Dashboard inventory Davis Root-cause attribution rate OpenPipeline Route and pipeline resolution SLO SLO definitions that break on re-detection Tagging Environment tagging convention

See what this domain finds on your own tenant.

One read-only run covers all nineteen domains. You keep the report either way.
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Find out what your Obervability is actually doing.

An audit takes one run. The findings take one meeting. What you do with them is up to you.
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