1. What is the playground? #
A demo environment.
The idea #
The playground is a Dynatrace SaaS environment provided by Dynatrace and continuously fed by demo applications (microservices, Kubernetes, databases, front end). It lets you use the platform on realistic data without installing anything: the ideal environment to follow this course.
Open the Dynatrace playground ↗
| Playground | Free trial | |
|---|---|---|
| Data | demo applications, already in place | yours, after installation |
| Configuration | mostly read-only | full (agents, settings, rights) |
| Duration | unlimited | limited (around 15 days) |
| Best use | discover, learn, prepare a certification | test on your own infrastructure |
Depending on the version: The playground address, its demo applications and the available Dynatrace apps change over time: if the link stops working, search for “Dynatrace playground” on the Dynatrace website.
2. Accessing it #
In a few minutes.
The steps #
- Click the “Open the Dynatrace playground” button above.
- Sign in with a Dynatrace account, or create one for free (e-mail address and password).
- You land on the environment home page: the app launcher (top-left icon) and search (Ctrl+K) give access to every app.
Common mistake: Entering personal or confidential data in the playground (queries, notebooks, comments): it is a shared environment, visible to other users.
Good to know: Some actions are disabled (agent installation, settings changes, rights management). To practise them, use a free trial or your own environment.
3. The discovery tour #
Six guided steps.
Overview #
| Step | App | What to look at | To go further |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kubernetes | clusters, namespaces, workloads and their health | Dynatrace Operator |
| 2 | Services | the slowest service, then a distributed trace | Service types |
| 3 | Problems | a Davis problem: root cause, impact, timeline | Problem management |
| 4 | Logs | filter a service’s errors, open a line | OpenPipeline |
| 5 | Notebooks | run the DQL queries in section 4 | Grail |
| 6 | Dashboards | open ready-made dashboards | DQL in practice |
Good practice: Keep the playground tab open during the course: each lesson becomes more concrete when you find the described screen on real data.
4. Exercises #
To do in a notebook.
Commands to know #
Open Notebooks, create a DQL section and run these queries:
Exercise 1: logs by level over the last hour.
fetch logs, from: -1h
| summarize lines = count(), by: { loglevel }
| sort lines descExercise 2: the ten services with the highest 90th percentile duration.
fetch spans, from: -30m
| filter request.is_root_span == true
| summarize requests = count(), p90 = percentile(duration, 90), by: { service.name }
| sort p90 desc
| limit 10Exercise 3: Davis problems over the last 24 hours.
fetch events, from: -24h
| filter event.kind == "DAVIS_PROBLEM"
| fields timestamp, event.name, event.status
| sort timestamp descExercise 4: open the most recent problem in the Problems app, identify the root cause suggested by Davis and the affected service, then find that service in the Services app.
Depending on the version: Field names (loglevel,request.is_root_span,event.kind) match the new platform; if a query returns nothing, check available fields by displaying a few rows (| limit 5).
