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Cortex connects to many third-party vendors whose system interfaces frequently change. As a result, integration behavior or configuration steps may shift without notice. If you encounter unexpected issues, check with your system administrator or refer to the vendor’s documentation for the most current information. Additionally, integration sync times vary and are subject to scheduling overrides and timing variance.
This article explains how to configure the integration for Datadog. For instructions on connecting Datadog to entities, see Connecting entities to Datadog. For information on how to use the integration, see Using the integration for Datadog.

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Why use the integration for Datadog

Datadog is an observability platform that tracks the health and performance of your services, infrastructure, and applications. The integration brings that operational data into Cortex, so the health of a service sits alongside its ownership, dependencies, and Scorecard results in one place. The integration for Datadog brings the following into Cortex:
  • Monitors - The status and query for each Datadog monitor linked to an entity.
  • SLOs - Targets, current value, and status for each service level objective (SLO) linked to an entity.
  • Dependencies - Service relationships discovered from Datadog’s Service Map, which feed into the Relationships graph.
  • Incidents - Every incident across your organization, with severity, status, and affected entities.
  • On-call schedules - Who’s on call now and who’s on call next for an entity.
Incidents and on-call schedules are only imported when you select their categories while configuring the integration. If you set up Datadog before categories were available, update the categories on your existing configuration to start importing this data. You can also build Scorecard rules and Cortex Query Language (CQL) queries against incident and on-call data, and track incident frequency and mean time to resolution (MTTR) in Eng Intelligence.

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Configuring Datadog

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Prerequisites

  1. Users with the Configure Integrations permission can configure Datadog.
  2. A Datadog application key with the following scopes:
    • monitors_read
    • apm_api_catalog_read
    • dashboards_read
    • metrics_read
    • timeseries_query
    • apm_service_catalog_read
    • slos_read
    • apm_read
    • teams_read
    • user_access_read
    • incident_read
    • on_call_read
  3. A Datadog API key.

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Installing Datadog in Cortex

  1. From the main sidebar, expand Integrations, then select Configurations.
  2. Locate Datadog, then click Install. The Datadog side panel opens.
  3. In the Datadog side panel, do the following:
    1. From the Category dropdown, select the types of data to import from Datadog (required). To see incidents and on-call schedules in Cortex, select Incidents and On-call. For more information, see Integration categories.
    2. Under Configuration alias, enter the alias you’ll use to tie entity registrations to different configuration accounts (required).
    3. From the Region dropdown, select the Datadog region where your account is hosted (required). See the Datadog docs for more information.
    4. Optionally, under Custom sub-domain, enter your organization’s custom subdomain, found in your Datadog URL, e.g. https://subdomain.datadoghq.com.
    5. Optionally, from the Environments dropdown, select environment tags for Datadog entities. If you set an environment tag here, make sure to set the env dropdown in Datadog to match. See the Datadog docs for more information.
    6. Under API key, enter the API key you generated in Datadog.
    7. Under App key, enter the application key you generated in Datadog. This key appears under the Key column in Datadog while viewing your list of Application Keys.
  4. Click Test connection. A successful connection means your integration is configured correctly.
  5. Click Save.
To modify an existing configuration, see Modifying an integration configuration.

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Using multiple Datadog configurations

The Datadog integration supports multiple configurations. To add another:
  1. From the main sidebar, expand Integrations, then select Configurations.
  2. Locate Datadog, then click Settings.
  3. In the upper-right corner of the page, click Add configuration.
  4. Follow the steps in Installing Datadog in Cortex above.
Each configuration requires an alias, which ties entity registrations to a specific account. If no alias is specified, Cortex uses the default configuration. To set a default:
  1. From the main sidebar, expand Integrations, then select Configurations.
  2. Locate Datadog, then click Settings.
  3. Click the pencil icon next to a configuration.
  4. Toggle on Set as default. If you only have one configuration, it’s automatically set as the default.
Last modified on October 8, 2026