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

Defining custom metrics

You have already seen that metrics are defined, and the related times series data is generated, by these methods:

  • By enabling core infrastructure integrations with the installation of the Datadog Agent
  • By enabling platform and application integrations provided by Datadog

Custom tags can be associated with the preceding set of metrics by defining them in the relevant configuration files. Some integrations also offer to inherit tags from source applications and platforms.

In addition to this group of metrics that are available out of the box or that can be enabled easily, there are multiple options available in Datadog to define custom metrics and tags. This is one of the features that makes Datadog a powerful monitoring platform that can be fine-tuned for your specific requirements.

The following properties need to be set for a custom metric:

  • Name: A name should not be more than 200 characters long, should begin with a letter...