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

Chapter 5: Metrics, Events, and Tags

In the first part of the book, we discussed general monitoring concepts and how to get started with Datadog, including installing the Agent and navigating the main menu options on the Datadog UI, the main interface available to the end users. In the first chapter, we also discussed metrics as a central concept in all modern monitoring applications, being used to measure the health and the state of software systems. Also, we looked at tags as a means to group and filter metrics data and other information such as events generated by the monitoring systems, especially Datadog.

In this chapter, we will explore in detail how metrics and tags, two important constructs that Datadog heavily depends on, are implemented. Metrics are the basic entities that are used for reporting monitoring information in Datadog. Datadog also uses tags to organize metrics and other types of monitoring information such as events and alerts. It is important to discuss metrics...