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Dynatrace Pricing vs. Micromegas

Dynatrace bills on its Dynatrace Platform Subscription (DPS) rate card: memory-hours of monitored hosts, per GiB of logs, and per data point of custom metrics. On the reference workload the estimate is ~$25,400/month for logs and monitoring, about 23× the Micromegas figure, with custom metrics excluded. The with-traces figure adds the reference span volume at $0.20/GiB ingested plus $0.0007/GiB-day retained and comes to ~$95,300/month, about 87×. Full-Stack is billed on memory-hours, so it is priced on 400 hosts × 8 GiB, the approximate number of machines sending data concurrently. This page uses the shared reference workload and methodology; see The Challenge of Traces for how traces are priced.

Rates verified October 2026. Estimates, not quotes — confirm current rates at dynatrace.com/pricing.

Dynatrace pricing on the reference workload

  • Full-Stack Monitoring (memory-based):

    • 400 hosts × 8 GiB × 730 hours/month × $0.01/GiB-hour
    • Subtotal: ~$23,360/month

  • Log Ingest & Process:

    • 7,694 GiB/month × $0.20/GiB
    • Subtotal: ~$1,539/month

  • Log Retain (90 days):

    • 7,694 GiB × 90 days × $0.0007/GiB-day
    • Subtotal: ~$485/month

  • Total Estimated Monthly Cost (Logs + Monitoring): ~$25,383/month, or ~$25,400

Custom metrics are excluded from the headline. Metric data points are billed at $0.15 per 100k. Full-Stack includes 900 custom-metric data points per GiB of memory per 15-minute interval, which for 400 hosts × 8 GiB over a month is about 8.4 billion data points (400 × 8 × 900 × 2,920 intervals). That covers about 6.1% of the workload's ~138 billion points per month. The remainder would cost about $194,800/month. The fine-grained instrumentation metrics in the Micromegas workload would not typically be sent to Dynatrace at this granularity.

With traces: ~$95,300/month. The span volume is ~294,146 GiB per month. Full-Stack includes 200 KiB per minute per GiB of memory, about 26,700 GiB/month (26,733) for the 400 hosts.

  • Span ingest: (294,146 − 26,733) GiB × $0.20/GiB = ~$53,483/month
  • Span retention: the first 10 days are free, so days 11–90 are billed: 294,146 GiB × 80 days × $0.0007/GiB-day = ~$16,472/month
  • Traces subtotal: ~$69,955/month, for a total of ~$95,338/month

What's included and what's billed separately

  • Included: unlimited users (no seat fees), and the Full-Stack custom-metric allotment described above.
  • Billed separately: log ingest, log retention and log queries (Log Query is $0.0035/GiB scanned), and custom metric data points beyond the allotment.
  • Retention options: "Retain with Included Queries" is $0.02/GiB-day, much more than the usage-based $0.0007/GiB-day used in this estimate.
  • Traces: $0.20/GiB ingest plus $0.0007/GiB-day retained, with the first 10 days of retention free. They are priced in the with-traces figure above and are not in the logs-and-monitoring estimate.

Cost comparison

Category Micromegas Dynatrace
Logs + monitoring ~$1,100/month (includes all traces) ~$25,400/month (custom metrics excluded)
With traces ~$1,100/month ~$95,300/month
Ratio 1× ~23× / ~87×

The Dynatrace estimates exclude custom metrics at scale. Including them at the reference workload's volume would dramatically increase the cost.

Qualitative differences

  • Platform Philosophy:

    • Dynatrace is known for its highly automated, AI-driven approach to observability, offering deep insights into application performance with minimal manual configuration.
    • Micromegas provides a unified data model for all telemetry types within your own cloud environment, offering greater control and cost efficiency for high-volume data.

  • Pricing Model: The DPS rate card offers granular, capability-based pricing. This can be predictable for standard monitoring but diverges dramatically at extreme metric or trace volumes.

  • Cost at Scale: The gap between Dynatrace and Micromegas widens as data volume increases. At the reference workload, it's ~23× on logs and monitoring and ~87× with traces. For organizations with high-cardinality custom metrics, the difference can be orders of magnitude.

  • Control & Data Ownership: Micromegas provides full data ownership within your own cloud account — a critical requirement for many organizations.

Sources

Dynatrace Rate Card, Dynatrace pricing, Full-Stack Monitoring license docs (included trace volume, 10-day free retention). Back to all SaaS vendor comparisons.