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

Generating events

Thus far, we have discussed how to view, search, and escalate events that are generated by Datadog. As with metrics and tags, custom events can be created as well in Datadog. The primary use of this feature is to use the event stream dashboard as a communication hub for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and production engineering teams.

A common scenario is deploying to an environment monitored by Datadog. During deployment, multiple services and processes will be restarted, and there will be a large volume of events. Posting a deployment as an event with details might help to alleviate the concerns of any other teams monitoring the environment but not actively participating in the deployment process.

An event can be posted from the event stream dashboard as a status update. Look at the following example:

Figure 5.10 – Posting a custom event

As with creating and managing other Datadog resources, events can be generated programmatically...