Agent v6 is a complete rewrite in Go of the Agent v5. V6 offers better performances, smaller footprint, and more features. It is the default Datadog Agent (v5 is no longer in active development).
Agent v6 is composed of a main process responsible for collecting infrastructure metrics, logs, and receiving DogStatsD metrics. The main components to this process are:
Two optional processes are spawned by the Agent if enabled in the datadog.yaml configuration file:
On Windows the services are listed as:
| Service | Description |
|---|---|
| DatadogAgent | “Datadog Agent” |
| datadog-trace-agent | “Datadog Trace Agent” |
| datadog-process-agent | “Datadog Process Agent” |
By default the Agent binds 3 ports on Linux and 4 on Windows and OSX:
| Port | Description |
|---|---|
| 5000 | Exposes runtime metrics about the Agent. |
| 5001 | Used by the Agent CLI and GUI to send commands and pull information from the running Agent. |
| 5002 | Serves the GUI server on Windows and OSX. |
| 8125 | Used for the DogStatsD server to receive external metrics. |
The collector gathers all standard metrics every 15 seconds. Agent v6 embed a Python2.7 interpreter to run integrations and custom checks.
The Agent forwarder send metrics over HTTPS to Datadog. Buffering prevents network splits from affecting metric reporting. Metrics are buffered in memory until a limit in size or number of outstanding send requests are reached. Afterwards, the oldest metrics are discarded to keep the forwarder’s memory footprint manageable. Logs are sent over an SSL-encrypted TCP connection to Datadog.
In v6, DogStatsD is a Golang implementation of Etsy’s StatsD metric aggregation daemon. It is used to receive and roll up arbitrary metrics over UDP or unix socket, thus allowing custom code to be instrumented without adding latency to the mix. Learn more about DogStatsD.
Agent v5 is composed of four major components, each written in Python running as a separate process:
agent.py): The collector runs checks on the current machine for configured integrations, and captures system metrics, such as memory and CPU.dogstatsd.py): This is a StatsD-compatible backend server that you can send custom metrics to from your applications.ddagent.py): The forwarder retrieves data from both DogStatsD and the collector, queues it up, and then sends it to Datadog.Note: For Windows users, all four Agent processes appear as instances of ddagent.exe with the description DevOps’ best friend.
A SupervisorD master process runs as the dd-agent user, and all forked subprocesses run as the same user. This also applies to any system call (iostat/netstat) initiated by the Datadog Agent. The Agent configuration resides at /etc/dd-agent/datadog.conf and /etc/dd-agent/conf.d. All configuration must be readable by dd-agent. The recommended permissions are 0600 since configuration files contain your API key and other credentials needed to access metrics.
The following ports are open for operations:
| Port | Description |
|---|---|
| tcp/17123 | The forwarder for normal operations |
| tcp/17124 | The forwarder for graphite support |
| udp/8125 | DogStatsD |
All listening processes are bound by default to 127.0.0.1 and/or ::1 on v3.4.1+ of the Agent. In earlier versions, they were bound to 0.0.0.0 (all interfaces). For information on running the Agent through a proxy see Agent proxy configuration. For information on IP ranges to allow, see Network Traffic.
The recommended number of open file descriptors is 1024. You can see this value with the command ulimit -a. If you have a hard limitation below the recommended value, for example Shell Fork Bomb Protection, one solution is to add the following in superisord.conf:
[supervisord]
minfds = 100 # Your hard limit
The new command line interface for the Agent v6 is sub-command based:
| Command | Notes |
|---|---|
check | Run the specified check |
configcheck | Print all configurations loaded & resolved of a running Agent |
diagnose | Execute some connectivity diagnosis on your system |
flare | Collect a flare and send it to Datadog |
health | Print the current Agent health |
help | Help about any command |
hostname | Print the hostname used by the Agent |
import | Import and convert configuration files from previous versions of the Agent |
installservice | Installs the Agent within the service control manager |
launch-gui | Starts the Datadog Agent GUI |
regimport | Import the registry settings into datadog.yaml |
remove-service | Removes the Agent from the service control manager |
restart-service | Restarts the Agent within the service control manager |
start | Start the Agent |
start-service | Starts the Agent within the service control manager |
status | Print the current status |
stopservice | Stops the Agent within the service control manager |
version | Print the version info |
To run a sub-command, first invoke the Agent binary.
<path_to_agent_bin> <sub_command> <options>
Some options have their own set of flags and options detailed in a help message. For example, to see how to use the check sub-command, run:
<agent_binary> check --help
You can configure the port on which the GUI runs in the datadog.yaml file. To disable the GUI, set the port’s value to -1.
For Windows and macOS, the GUI is enabled by default and runs on port 5002. For Linux, the GUI is disabled by default.
When the Agent is running, use the datadog-agent launch-gui command to open the GUI in your default web browser.
Note: The Agent GUI isn’t supported on 32-bit Windows platforms.
Cookies must be enabled in your browser. The GUI generates and saves a token in your browser which is used for authenticating all communications with the GUI server.
To start the GUI, the user must have the required permissions. If you are able to open datadog.yaml, you are able to use the GUI.
For security reasons, the GUI can only be accessed from the local network interface (localhost/127.0.0.1), therefore you must be on the same host that the Agent is running. That is, you can’t run the Agent on a VM or a container and access it from the host machine.
| OS | Supported versions |
|---|---|
| Amazon | Amazon Linux 2 |
| Debian x86_64 | Debian 7 (wheezy)+ and SysVinit in Agent 6.6.0+) |
| Ubuntu x86_64 | Ubuntu 14.04+ |
| RedHat/CentOS x86_64 | RedHat/CentOS 6+ |
| Docker | Version 1.12+ |
| Kubernetes | Version 1.3+ |
| SUSE Enterprise Linux x86_64 | SUSE 11 SP4+ (not SysVinit) |
| Fedora x86_64 | Fedora 26+ |
| macOS | macOS 10.12+ |
| Windows server 64-bit | Windows Server 2008r2+ and Server Core (not Nano) |
| Windows 64-bit | Windows 7+ |
Note: Source install may work on operating systems not listed here and is supported on a best effort basis.
| OS | Supported versions |
|---|---|
| Amazon | Amazon Linux 2 |
| Debian x86_64 | Debian 7 (wheezy)+ |
| Ubuntu x86_64 | Ubuntu 12.04+ |
| RedHat/CentOS x86_64 | RedHat/CentOS 5+ |
| Docker | Version 1.12+ |
| Kubernetes | Version 1.3 to 1.8 |
| SUSE Enterprise Linux x86_64 | SUSE 11 SP4+ |
| Fedora x86_64 | Fedora 26+ |
| MacOS | macOS 10.10+ |
| Windows server 64-bit | Windows server 2008r2+ |
| Windows 64-bit | Windows 7+ |
Note: Source install may work on operating systems not listed here and is supported on a best effort basis.
| OS | Supported versions |
|---|---|
| AIX | AIX 6.1 TL9 SP6, 7.1 TL5 SP3, 7.2 TL3 SP0 |
An example of the Datadog Agent resource consumption is below. Tests were made on an AWS EC2 machine c5.xlarge instance (4 VCPU/ 8GB RAM). The vanilla datadog-agent was running with a process check to monitor the Agent itself. Enabling more integrations may increase Agent resource consumption.
Enabling JMX Checks forces the Agent to use more memory depending on the number of beans exposed by the monitored JVMs. Enabling the trace and process Agents increases the resource consumption as well.
Note: Since v5.15 of the container Agent, it is recommended to set container resources to at least 256MB due to an added memory cache – upping the limit is not to account for baseline usage but rather to accommodate temporary spikes. Agent 6 has a much more limited memory footprint.
Manage the Datadog Agent and Integrations using configuration management tools:
To manually update the Datadog Agent core between two minor versions on a given host, run the corresponding install command for your platform.
Note: If you want to manually update one specific Agent integration refer to the Integration Management guide.
See the dedicated documentation for Agent configuration files.
To send your Agent data to the Datadog EU site, edit your Agent main configuration file datadog.yaml and set the site parameter to:
site: datadoghq.eu
See the dedicated documentation for Agent log files
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
