---
title: Administrator's Guide
description: Setup and install Datadog as an administrator to avoid common issues.
breadcrumbs: Docs > Administrator's Guide
---

# Administrator's Guide

Use this Datadog Administrators guide when your company has purchased and is ready to leverage Datadog's observability platform. This guide helps you make the most out of Datadog to gain visibility into the health and performance of your underlying infrastructure, supporting services, and applications. It provides suggestions for designing, installing, and managing an enterprise-grade installation of Datadog, tailored to your needs. As an extension of the main [documentation](https://docs.datadoghq.com/), this guide offers best practices, guidance, and examples to help you set up a production environment that matches your workloads and installation needs.

After using this guide to install Datadog to scale with your organization, you can manage your installation efficiently without worrying about hardware refreshes, operating system patches, server updates, or cluster rebalance details. Instead, you can focus on the benefits of a full observability system, such as:

- Lowering your cloud and infrastructure costs.
- Reducing the severity, frequency, and mean time to resolution of incidents.
- Collect, process, and correlate observability and security data from your entire stack in one platform.
- Automate remediation and take action directly from Datadog with complete context from observability data across your stack.

## Benefits of this guide{% #benefits-of-this-guide %}

This guide outlines the foundational concepts of Datadog and offers steps to prevent common issues such as fragmented data models, unstructured user grouping, ungoverned consumption, and unrealized value.

## How to use this guide{% #how-to-use-this-guide %}

This guide is organized into three sections that provide important concepts, plans, tasks, and structures to create and streamline your Datadog ownership experience:

- **[Plan](https://docs.datadoghq.com/administrators_guide/plan)**: Learn the parts of Datadog that are important to your use case, build a knowledge base, develop some practical experience, plan your installation, and apply best practices when configuring your observability platform.
- **[Build](https://docs.datadoghq.com/administrators_guide/build)**: Understand what needs to be installed and create a detailed rollout methodology so you can set up a Datadog environment that is best suited to your needs.
- **[Run](https://docs.datadoghq.com/administrators_guide/run)**: Maintain Datadog, maximize its power, and manage ongoing support.

{% image
   source="https://datadog-docs.imgix.net/images/administrators_guide/plan_build_run_2.30b3cb0b9a337300351313a138ba895b.png?auto=format"
   alt="Diagram of the plan, build, and run phases" /%}

## Next Steps{% #next-steps %}

Throughout this guide you will learn how to maximize the value of Datadog by exploring a knowledge base, experimenting with the product, and creating an installation design. To get started using the Datadog Administrator's Guide, review the [Getting Started](https://docs.datadoghq.com/administrators_guide/getting_started) page for information on interacting with Datadog Support, signing up for free Datadog training courses, and learning how to create a test environment.

- [Getting Started: Learn how to send a Flare to Support, sign up for Datadog Training courses, and build a test environment.](https://docs.datadoghq.com/administrators_guide/getting_started)
- [Plan: Plan your Datadog installation by creating a sizing profile, developing general and best practices, and optimizing data collection.](https://docs.datadoghq.com/administrators_guide/plan)
- [Build: Build your Datadog environment by prioritizing features, developing an internal support system, and provisioning your architecture.](https://docs.datadoghq.com/administrators_guide/build)
- [Run: Maintain and run your Datadog installation by creating Dashboards, onboarding new infrastructure, and performing Datadog Agent upgrades.](https://docs.datadoghq.com/administrators_guide/run)

## Further Reading{% #further-reading %}

- [Learn more about the capabilities available in Datadog](https://docs.datadoghq.com/getting_started/application/)