Book Image

Datadog Cloud Monitoring Quick Start Guide

By : Thomas Kurian Theakanath
Book Image

Datadog Cloud Monitoring Quick Start Guide

By: Thomas Kurian Theakanath

Overview of this book

Datadog is an essential cloud monitoring and operational analytics tool which enables the monitoring of servers, virtual machines, containers, databases, third-party tools, and application services. IT and DevOps teams can easily leverage Datadog to monitor infrastructure and cloud services, and this book will show you how. The book starts by describing basic monitoring concepts and types of monitoring that are rolled out in a large-scale IT production engineering environment. Moving on, the book covers how standard monitoring features are implemented on the Datadog platform and how they can be rolled out in a real-world production environment. As you advance, you'll discover how Datadog is integrated with popular software components that are used to build cloud platforms. The book also provides details on how to use monitoring standards such as Java Management Extensions (JMX) and StatsD to extend the Datadog platform. Finally, you'll get to grips with monitoring fundamentals, learn how monitoring can be rolled out using Datadog proactively, and find out how to extend and customize the Datadog platform. By the end of this Datadog book, you will have gained the skills needed to monitor your cloud infrastructure and the software applications running on it using Datadog.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Datadog
9
Section 2: Extending Datadog
14
Section 3: Advanced Monitoring

Dashboards

A Datadog dashboard is a visual tool that can be used to track and analyze metrics. It offers a rich set of features that can be used to build custom dashboards, in addition to the dashboards available out of the box.

The Dashboards main menu option has two options, Dashboard List and New Dashboard:

Figure 3.8 – The Dashboards main menu options

The Dashboard List menu will list all the dashboards grouped by various categories.

Two types of custom dashboards can be created in Datadog, Timeboards and Screenboards:

Figure 3.9 – Datadog dashboard types

The graphs in a Timeboard dashboard will share the same time frame, so it will be useful for comparing multiple metrics side by side. This feature makes a Timeboard dashboard useful for triaging issues. The Screenboard dashboard doesn't have a time constraint, and disparate objects can be assembled on it. In that sense, a Screenboard type dashboard is more...