Summary
The Datadog Agent can be used for monitoring both classic and microservices-based environments that are built on a variety of cloud platforms and operating systems. To collect and publish monitoring metrics into its SaaS backend, an agent needs to be run on the local environment. The agent could be run directly on the host machine, as a container on a Docker host, or as a service in a microservice orchestration framework such as Kubernetes. This chapter looked at various configuration options available for deploying the Datadog Agent and typical use cases.
In the next chapter, we will look at key features of the Datadog UI. Though most of the changes can be done using APIs, the Datadog UI is a handy tool for both users and administrators to get a view into Datadog's backend, especially the custom dashboards that provide visual insights into the state of infrastructure and the application software system.