Data Explorer

Data Explorer allows you to create custom charts. Custom charts enable you to analyze any combination of monitoring metrics directly on your dashboards. The custom network devices in your environment are those that can’t run Dynatrace OneAgent. These include Firewalls, DataPower gateways, cloud Databases, and any other network appliance. The Dynatrace API allows you to send custom metrics from your own networked box into Dynatrace based on the native properties of these devices (or to write your own scripts that pull the metrics from your networked box).

screenshot of Data Explorer graph

Options/Features

With data explorer you can:
  • Analyze multidimensional metrics
  • Choose from any of five visualizations (graph, pie, single value, table, or top list)
  • Add your visualization to your dashboards
  • Provides foundation for metric calculation in charts on dashboards

The Metrics API v1 allows you to create new kinds of network components and register/send custom metrics for these devices

Setup and Configuration

Create a chart:

  1. Select Explore data from navigation menu
  2. Select a metric (e.g. “CPU usage %”)
  3. Choose the Aggregation (e.g. Average, Minimum, Maximum)
  4. Choose the Visualization type and color scheme on the right-hand side of the page in the Settings tab
  5. Select Run query
  6. Select Add metric to add another, and then repeat the previous step
    • You may need to adjust the timeframe in the upper-right corner
  7. ​Settings can be adjusted at any time on the right-hand side of the page
  8. When finished, select Pin to dashboard to save it to a dashboard
  9. If you want to export the chart, use the three buttons (…) next to Pin to dashboard and select the format
  10. Use the Settings panel to configure chart settings (chart is updated with each change)

Components of a metric query:

Metric Name

Select metric name in Filter metrics by… box

Can be a built-in metric or metric ingested from Prometheus, Telegraf, etc. through metrics API
Aggregation

AVG, MAX, MIN, SUM, COUNT, or MEDIAN

Specifies how the results of the query are aggregated over time and the reported dimensions of the metric

Query provides statistically most accurate results for a given query (depends on nature of metric)
Grouping Query groups all dimensions using the metric’s default aggregation
Scope

Determined by any Filter set

By default, scope is (include all)

Can filter query by selecting an option in the Filter box

See examples here

Create a custom event:

You can also create a custom event for alerting, that will send out problem alerts based on your configured settings. For information on how to do this,

  1. Go to Problem Detection and Analysis and scroll to Metric Breach Configuration

Usage

Limitations

10 metrics maximum per chart

Up to 100 series per metric

Use the chart in data explorer:

  • Chart elements are active
  • To see details in tooltips, hover over chart elements
  • To drill down from a problematic (red) element, select it
  • To hide or show a chart element, select the corresponding label in the chart legend
Pin the chart to a dashboard:
  1. Select Pin to dashboard
  2. To return to Data explorer with the chart open for viewing and editing, open the menu in the upper-right corner of the tile and select View details. Now two buttons are displayed in the upper-right corner of Data explorer:
    • Save changes to dashboard saves the chart to the same tile and dashboard you used to open the Data explorer
    • Pin to dashboard saves the chart as a tile on a different dashboard
    • For further information on Dashboards, see Dashboarding

Useful Links

Dynatrace Docs