Dt Obs Tracing

When you need to dig into distributed traces in Dynatrace rather than just looking at service-level metrics, this skill handles the DQL queries for span analysis. It covers the usual suspects: finding slow requests over a threshold, tracking down failed spans by HTTP status or exception type, mapping service dependencies, and looking up specific trace IDs. The skill doc walks through span kinds (server, client, consumer, producer), shows how to filter for root spans versus internal operations, and includes practical patterns for percentile calculations and sampling extrapolation. It's focused on the trace level, so you'd switch to other skills for logs, problems, or service RED metrics.

skills.sh installs: 2.9K
GitHub stars: 177
last updated: Aug 21, 2026

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Install

$ npx -y skills add dynatrace/dynatrace-for-ai --skill dt-obs-tracing --agent claude-code

Installs into .claude/skills of the current project.

Files

Application Tracing Skill

Overview

Distributed traces in Dynatrace consist of spans - building blocks representing units of work. With Traces in Grail, every span is accessible via DQL with full-text searchability on all attributes. This skill covers trace fundamentals, common analysis patterns, and span-type specific queries.

Use Cases

1. Investigate Slow Requests

Goal: Find and diagnose requests exceeding a latency threshold
Trigger: "slow requests", "high latency", "p99 response time", "find traces over 5 seconds"
Done: List of slow traces with duration, endpoint, service, and trace IDs for drilldown

2. Analyze Request Failures

Goal: Identify failed requests, failure reasons, and exception patterns
Trigger: "failed spans", "HTTP 500 errors", "exception analysis", "failure rate by service"
Done: Failure breakdown by reason (HTTP code, exception, gRPC status) with exemplar traces

SKILL.md on GitHub