Datadog
Overview
Datadog is an application performance monitoring platform that provides real-time observability into entities, servers, databases, and tools, providing developers with a comprehensive understanding of their infrastructure as well as the ability to identify areas for improvement.
Cortex is uniquely equipped to augment Datadog's tools, providing greater visibility into your entities. In this guide, you'll learn how to set up the Datadog integration to pull in services and metrics for entities:
Monitors
SLOs
Dependencies
How to configure Datadog with Cortex
Prerequisites
Before getting started, make sure you have created the following:
You can create this in Datadog under Organizational Settings > Applications Key.
Include the following scopes:
monitors_read
apm_api_catalog_read
dashboards_read
metrics_read
timeseries_query
apm_service_catalog_read
slos_read
apm_read
You can create this in Datadog under Organizational Settings > API Key.
Configure the integration in Cortex
In Cortex, navigate to the Datadog settings page:
In Cortex, click your avatar in the lower left corner, then click Settings.
Under "Integrations", click Datadog.
Click Add configuration.
Configure the Datadog integration form:
Account alias: Enter a name that Cortex will associate this configuration with.
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.
API key: Enter the API key you generated in Datadog.
Region: Select your Datadog region from the dropdown.
Custom subdomain: Enter the custom subdomain for your Datadog instance.
This field only takes the subdomain, not the entire URL. For example, this field would take
cortex-docs
fromhttps://cortex-docs.datadoghq.com
.
Environments: Optionally, enter environment tags for Datadog entities.
If you set an environment tag here, make sure to set the
env
dropdown in Datadog to match.
Click Save.
After saving your configuration, you are redirected to the Datadog integration settings page in Cortex. In the upper right corner of the page, click Test configuration to ensure Datadog was configured properly.
Configure the integration for multiple Datadog accounts
The Datadog integration has multi-account support. You can add a configuration for each additional by repeating the process above.
Each configuration requires an alias, which Cortex uses to correlate the designated with registrations for various entities. Registrations can also use a default configuration without a listed alias. You can edit aliases and default configurations from the Datadog page in your Cortex settings. Select the edit icon next to a given configuration and toggle Set as default on. If you only have one configuration, it will automatically be set as the default.How to connect Cortex entities to Datadog
How to connect Cortex entities to Datadog
Tag discovery
By default, Cortex will use the entity tag (e.g. my-entity
) as the "best guess" for Datadog tag. For example, if your entity tag is my-entity
, then the corresponding tag in Datadog should also be my-entity
.
If your Datadog tags don’t cleanly match the Cortex entity tag, you can override this in the Cortex entity descriptor.
Import entities from Datadog
See the Create services documentation for instructions on importing entities.
Editing the entity descriptor
You can use service tags to connect Datadog services to Cortex entities.
x-cortex-apm:
datadog:
serviceTags:
- tag: entity
value: brain
alias: my-default-alias
- tag: entity
value: cerebrum
alias: my-other-alias
tag
Tag for the project in Datadog
✓
value
Value for the project; Cortex will find monitors and SLOs by querying tag:value OR tag:value2 ...
✓
alias
Alias for the configuration in Cortex (only needed if you have opted into multi-account support)
These tags are used to "discover" your monitors and SLOs. Cortex will find monitors and SLOs by querying tag:value OR tag:value2 ...
If you want to hard code and/or override discovery, you can define a monitor or SLOs block in the entity descriptor, as described below.
Monitors and SLOs
Adding monitors let you see information about their current status directly from a catalog - via the Monitors column - and under the Operations
section of an entity page. You can find your monitors from Datadog's Manage Monitors page.
The ID of a monitor is found in the URL when you click on a monitor in your Datadog dashboard i.e., https://app.datadoghq.com/monitors/****
.
info:
x-cortex-apm:
datadog:
monitors:
- id: 12345
alias: my-default-alias
- id: 67890
alias: my-other-alias
Like monitors, Datadog SLOs can be found in the Operations
section of an entity page. You can find the SLOs for your instance on Datadog's SLO status page.
The ID for the SLO can be found in the URL when you click on an SLO in the Datadog dashboard. For example, https://app.datadoghq.com/slo?slo_id=****&timeframe=7d&tab=status_and_history
.
info:
x-cortex-slos:
datadog:
- id: 0b73859a3e2504bf09ad23a161702654
alias: my-default-alias
- id: 228499184a9efe34d4e4e9df838c7fa1
alias: my-other-alias
Monitors and SLOs have the same field definitions.
id
Datadog ID for the monitor or SLO
✓
alias
Alias for the configuration in Cortex (only needed if you have opted into multi-account support)
Dependency mapping
Cortex automatically syncs dependencies from Datadog's Service Map, using the entity identifier (x-cortex-tag
) to map entities found in the Service Map.
The relationships Cortex discovers through the integration will feed directly into the Relationships graph, so you can easily visualize the connections between your entities.
If you have two entities - for example, entity-one
and entity-two
- that have a dependency edge in Datadog's Service Map, both entities should exist in Cortex with the same entity identifiers.
You can override this by defining entity tags where tag
= entity
and value
= entity name in Datadog Service Map
.
If the entity tag in Cortex does not exactly match the entity identifier in Datadog, the dependencies will not automatically sync. You can override automatic discovery by defining values in the entity descriptor.
You can connect an APM service for dependency mapping in the entity descriptor:
x-cortex-apm:
datadog:
serviceName: cortex-gateway.gateway
Using the Datadog integration
View Datadog monitors and SLOs on entity pages
With the Datadog integration, you'll be able to find monitors and SLOs on an entity's home page. High-level information about monitors and SLOs appears in the Overview tab.
Click Monitoring in the entity's sidebar to see more detailed data about both monitors and SLOS. Both sections display tags for Pass, Fail, Warning, and No Data for each monitor or SLO.
The SLOs column shows each SLO, its target(s), the current value for that entity, its status. and the period of time the SLO is being calculated for. For example, if the time listed is "7 days ago," then the SLO is looking at the time range starting 7 days ago to now..
The Monitors column shows the title for each monitor, its query (if available), and its status.
Clicking any block with a nonzero value will open a modal with more detailed information. The monitor modals will list all monitors with the applicable status. The SLO modals will also display targets for each SLO that is passing or failing.
Scorecards and CQL
With the Datadog integration, you can create Scorecard rules and write CQL queries based on Datadog metrics, monitors, and SLOS.
See more examples in the CQL Explorer in Cortex.
You can read more about Datadog's metrics and custom metrics in their docs.
Discovery audit
Cortex will pull recent changes from your Datadog environment into the discovered entities list. Here, you can find new entities in Datadog that have not been imported into the catalog - these will have the tag New APM Resource - as well as entities in the catalog that no longer exist in Datadog - these will have the tag APM Resource Not Detected.
Background sync
The dependency sync runs automatically each day at 12 a.m. UTC, and can be run manually via the Sync dependencies button.
FAQs and troubleshooting
Can I set a Scorecard rule to monitor Datadog monitors/SLOs based on tags?
Yes, you can specify key-value pairs that allow Cortex to discover your SLOs and monitors, and use these tags in Scorecard rules.
How does Datadog work with other dependency sources?
When leveraging multiple dependency sources such as Datadog and a catalog entity's YAML, all the sources would be merged together and Cortex will de-duplicate the dependencies.
For example, if an entity YAML indicates X → Y
and Datadog indicates X → Y
and X → Z
, the entity will display two edges presented as X → Y
and X → Z
.
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