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

Tagging Datadog resources

In the previous sections of this chapter, we have touched upon the concept of tags as a means of grouping and filtering metrics. While the use of tags is similar to that of keywords, labels, or hashtags on other systems, it is important to learn how tags are applied to metrics. Tags can be applied to other Datadog resources such as events and monitors as well. However, we will focus on how they are applied and used while working with metrics in the following section.

Defining tags

The following are the main rules and best practices for defining a tag:

  • A tag should start with a letter and can contain the following characters: alphanumeric, underscores, minuses, colons, periods, and slashes.
  • A tag should be in lowercase letters. If uppercase letters are used, they will be converted into lowercase. The auto-conversion of the case can create confusion, and so it is advisable to define tags only in lowercase.
  • A tag can be up to 200 characters...