dt-dql-essentials

The dt-dql-essentials skill is a comprehensive reference and guidance package for writing, building, fixing, and optimizing Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) queries. DQL is a pipeline-based language that chains commands with the pipe operator to filter, transform, and aggregate observability data, and its syntax differs meaningfully from SQL. The skill exists to prevent common syntax errors and to make queries faster, more efficient, and cheaper by reducing the volume of data scanned per run — directly lowering query consumption and cost.

The skill is organized as an index that routes tasks to detailed reference files. It covers fetch commands, data models, field namespaces, time alignment, entity and Smartscape topology patterns, metric discovery, and a large catalog of DQL functions grouped by category — arrays, aggregation, conversion, string, time, mathematical, cryptographic, network, iterative, timeseries, and more. A dedicated optimization reference teaches cost-reducing techniques such as filtering early, using bucket filters, keeping time ranges short, selecting only needed fields, sampling, and managing cardinality. Additional references cover summarization and makeTimeseries bucketing, iterative array expressions, conditional logic helpers, and operator subtleties like the `in` subquery operator and full time-alignment unit tables.

It targets Dynatrace platform users, SREs, observability engineers, and analysts who query logs, spans, and metrics or build timeseries and dashboards. The documentation explicitly scopes itself: it is for authoring and tuning query text, not for explaining existing queries or monitoring a tenant's actual billing consumption, which it defers to a separate costs skill. It is a read-only, Apache-2.0 licensed knowledge resource with no executable behavior of its own.