Welcome to the Gen3 Migration Course
Dynatrace has undergone its biggest platform transformation since the move from AppMon to Dynatrace SaaS. The "latest Dynatrace" (Gen3) replaces many classic concepts with a unified, DQL-powered platform built on Grail — a new data lakehouse that stores all observability data in one place.
This course teaches you everything you need to migrate from Gen2 (classic SaaS/Managed) to Gen3 — from the UI changes to the deep technical differences in APIs, alerting, dashboards, and access control.
What Changed and Why
The core philosophy shift: everything is queryable with DQL. Instead of separate UIs for metrics, logs, traces, and entities — you query them all with one language.
GEN2 (Classic) GEN3 (Latest Dynatrace)
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Metric expressions (d:, :splitBy) DQL timeseries command
USQL (User Session Query Language) DQL fetch user.events / user.sessions
Entity selectors (type(HOST),tag(x)) DQL smartscapeNodes + traverse
Classic dashboards (tile-based) Gen3 dashboards (DQL-powered, v21)
Metric events (threshold alerts) Davis anomaly detectors (DQL-based)
Alerting profiles + notifications Workflows + email/Slack/Jira actions
Management zones Segments
Environment-level IAM Account-level IAM with ABAC policies
Settings API v1 (JSON configs) Settings 2.0 (schema-based)
Classic SLOs (metric-based) Platform SLOs (DQL-based SLIs)
Problems API v2 DQL fetch dt.davis.problems
Custom events API v1 Events API v2 + DQL fetch events
What Stays the Same
Not everything changed. These work the same way:
- OneAgent — same installation, same auto-instrumentation
- ActiveGate — same role for extensions and routing
- Davis AI — same root cause analysis, now with CoPilot
- Extensions 2.0 — same YAML format, same lifecycle
- Kubernetes Operator — same DynaKube CRD
- RUM injection — same JavaScript tag
Course Structure
This course has 5 tracks with 21 modules:
Track 1: Platform Overview (4 modules)
What's new, navigation, Grail architecture, Smartscape entities
Track 2: DQL & Data Access (5 modules)
DQL fundamentals, metrics, entity queries, USQL migration, log queries
Track 3: Dashboards & Notebooks (3 modules)
Dashboard migration, notebooks, variables and filters
Track 4: Alerting & Automation (4 modules)
Anomaly detectors, workflows, SLO migration, auto-remediation
Track 5: Access Control & Config (5 modules)
Segments, IAM/ABAC, Settings 2.0, Terraform/Monaco, migration checklist
Prerequisites
- Basic Dynatrace knowledge (you've used Gen2 before)
- Access to a Dynatrace SaaS environment (Gen3)
- Optional: a Gen2 environment for side-by-side comparison
Each module includes hands-on exercises you can run on your own environment. Let's get started.