Dynatrace Tags: The Key to Management Zones, Dashboards, and Alerting

Tags in Dynatrace

Tags in Dynatrace are flexible labels that you assign to monitored entities such as services, hosts, applications, or process groups. They play a crucial role in organizing and categorizing these entities, enabling efficient management across features like Management Zones, Alerting Profiles, and Dashboard Filters.

By tagging entities like Hosts, Synthetic Monitors, and Application Services, you can streamline observability, automate alerting, and simplify data segmentation. In this article, we’ll explore the types of tags in Dynatrace and their practical use cases.

Navigation Path for tags in Dynatrace

Global Settings (Settings Classic) -> Tags -> Automatic and Manual Tags

There are 2 types of tags

1. Automatic Tags
2. Manually Applied Tags

Automatic Tags

We should define rules based on metadata (like environment, team, or region), and Dynatrace applies tags automatically on those particular monitored entities, like hosts, synthetic, and application services, etc. Please refer image below for reference.

Note: Please define rules carefully while you create the automatically applied tags. Once you have created them, you cannot remove them directly from the host or other items.

Manually applied tags

Manually applied Tags: Best for small-scale environments. You apply tags directly to specific entities via the UI. Manually applied tags can be applied directly on specific monitored items and can be removed directly on specific monitored items, like hosts, etc

Please refer image below for your understanding

Note: Manually applied tags can be removed directly by clicking on (x) mark. Please refer snapshot below for your understanding.

Blue Arrow: The Manually Applied tag can be removed by clicking on x mark

Red Arrow: The Automatic tag cannot be removed directly on the monitored entity; we should modify the rule in the automatic tag section

Use case 1: Apply Tagging in Management  Zones

Dynatrace allows you to map monitored entities—such as hosts, process groups, and synthetic monitors into Management Zones using tags. This enables targeted visibility, access control, and streamlined operations across complex environments. As illustrated in the image below, we’ve implemented a rule that automatically assigns any synthetic monitor containing the tag to the Veerpedia Management Zone.

This is a practical example of how tags can be leveraged to dynamically group entities based on metadata.

Use case 2: Apply Tagging in Dynatrace Dashboards

Tags in Dynatrace can be effectively used within Dashboards to monitor entities such as hosts, services, and synthetic monitors that share common labels. This enables focused visibility across related components and simplifies performance tracking.

As shown in the image below, each dashboard tile can be filtered using the Data Explorer, allowing you to display metrics only for entities that match specific tags. For example, you can configure tiles to show data exclusively for hosts tagged with, or synthetic monitors labeled.

Once you filter with tags and click on run query, after that, Save to Dashboard or Pin to Dashboard

Use case 3: Apply Tagging in Dynatrace Alerting

Tags in Dynatrace can be strategically applied to customize alerting behavior across different monitored entities. As illustrated in the image below, we’ve configured alerting profiles based on host criticality:

1. Critical Hosts: Tagged accordingly, these hosts trigger resource usage alerts immediately, with zero waiting time.
2. Non-Critical Hosts: These are configured with a 30-minute alert delay, allowing for more relaxed monitoring thresholds.

This setup demonstrates how tags can be used to:

1. Prioritize alerts for mission-critical infrastructure.
2. Reduce noise from less sensitive systems.
3. Tailor alerting profiles to match operational urgency and business impact.

By categorizing hosts with meaningful tags, you gain precise control over how and when alerts are triggered, ensuring the right teams respond at the right time.

Dynatrace Tags can be used to prioritize the Incidents in Service Now, Jira Ticketing tool as P1, P2, P3, P4. To see how tags can be used in Jira for Prioritize Ticket Urgency, watch my YouTube Tutorial. Click on below Hyper Link

Implementing Jira Ticket Priority Rules for Dynatrace Alerts | Dynatrace + Jira Integration

Please let me know your doubts in the comments section