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 7: Monitors and Alerts

In the last chapter, we learned how infrastructure is monitored using Datadog. The modern, cloud-based infrastructure is far more complex and virtual than the data center-based, bare-metal compute, storage, and network infrastructure. Datadog is designed to work with cloud-centric infrastructure, and it meets most of the infrastructure monitoring needs out of the box, be it a bare-metal or public cloud-based infrastructure.

A core requirement of any monitoring application is to notify you about an ongoing issue. Ideally, before that issue results in a service outage. In previous chapters, we discussed metrics and how they are generated, viewed, and charted on dashboards. An important use of metrics is to predict an upcoming issue. For example, by tracking the system.disk.free metric on a storage device, it is easy to notify when it reaches a certain point. By combining the system.disk.total metric to that equation, it's also possible to track...