View and Alert on APM Usage

Datadog has many pricing plans to fit your needs. For more information, see the Pricing page. Read APM documentation on APM Billing to understand how billing works for APM and Distributed Tracing.

Usage page

If you are an admin of your account, you can view your account usage using the Usage Page which gets updated every 72 hours.

MetricDescription
APM HostsShows the 99th percentile of all distinct APM hosts over all hours in the current month.
Indexed SpansShows the sum of all Indexed Spans indexed over all hours in the current month.
Fargate TasksShows the average of all Fargate tasks over all hours in the current month.

Set alert on APM hosts

To get alerts in case a code deployment scales the number of hosts sending traces, set up monitor on APM host count. Get notified if the host volumes in any scope (prod, availability-zone, etc…) of your infrastructure is growing unexpectedly:

  1. Go to Monitors -> New Monitor
  2. Set up a new metric monitor with datadog.apm.host_instance
  3. Define the rate you would like to set as a warning or error.
  4. Define an explicit notification: The volume of hosts on this env just got too high has exceeded the allocated threshold value. Scale down the number of APM enabled hosts.

Set alert on indexed spans

To get alerts in case a code deployment causes a spike in Indexed Spans generated, set up Analytics monitors on Indexed Spans. Get notified at any moment if the Indexed Span volumes in any infrastructure scope (for example,service, availability-zone) is growing unexpectedly:

  1. Go to Analytics view in APM
  2. Select the env (you can select *)
  3. Select count (you can select *)
  4. Select Export -> Export to Monitor
  5. Define the Indexed Span volume rate you would like to set as a warning or error.
  6. Define an explicit notification: The volume of Indexed Spans on this service just got too high. Define an additional exclusion filter or increase the filtering rate to put it back under control.

Learn more about retention filters.