How long must applications run before traffic spike and drop alerts are raised in Dynatrace?

In Dynatrace, the period before traffic spike and drop alerts are raised is determined by the necessity to establish a reliable baseline of application performance and user behavior. A full week is typically the timeframe required for the system to collect sufficient data, analyze trends, and recognize what constitutes normal behavior under varying load conditions. This duration allows Dynatrace to accurately assess patterns of traffic—ensuring that it can differentiate between regular fluctuations and genuine anomalies.

By collecting data over this time frame, Dynatrace builds a robust understanding of what standard operational metrics look like. This includes metrics such as user interaction levels, response times, and resource utilization. Once this baseline is established, the platform can effectively trigger alerts when significant deviations—such as spikes or drops—occur, ensuring that teams are notified only of events that deviate from what has been determined as 'normal.'

This approach minimizes false positives and enhances the reliability of alerts, allowing teams to respond more effectively to actual issues rather than dealing with noise in the data generated from short-lived or sporadic metrics. Thus, a full week is the ideal duration to achieve a balance between timely alerts and the accuracy of baseline performance models.