Cluster Agent for Kubernetes

Overview

The Datadog Cluster Agent provides a streamlined, centralized approach to collecting cluster level monitoring data. By acting as a proxy between the API server and node-based Agents, the Cluster Agent helps to alleviate server load. It also relays cluster level metadata to node-based Agents, allowing them to enrich the metadata of locally collected metrics.

Using the Datadog Cluster Agent allows you to:

  • Alleviate the impact of Agents on your infrastructure.
  • Isolate node-based Agents to their respective nodes, reducing RBAC rules to solely read metrics and metadata from the kubelet.
  • Provide cluster level metadata that can only be found in the API server to the Node Agents, in order for them to enrich the metadata of the locally collected metrics.
  • Enable the collection of cluster level data, such as the monitoring of services or SPOF and events.
  • Use Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) with custom Kubernetes metrics and external metrics. See the Autoscaling on custom and external metrics guide for more details.

If you installed the Datadog Agent using Helm chart v2.7.0 or Datadog Operator v1.0.0+, the Datadog Cluster Agent is enabled by default.

If you’re using Docker, the Datadog Cluster Agent is available on Docker Hub and GCR:

Docker HubGCR
hub.docker.com/r/datadog/cluster-agentgcr.io/datadoghq/cluster-agent
Docker Hub is subject to image pull rate limits. If you are not a Docker Hub customer, Datadog recommends that you update your Datadog Agent and Cluster Agent configuration to pull from GCR or ECR. For instructions, see Changing your container registry.

Minimum Agent and Cluster Agent versions

Some features related to later Kubernetes versions require a minimum Datadog Agent version.

Kubernetes versionAgent versionCluster Agent versionReason
1.16.0+7.19.0+1.9.0+Kubelet metrics deprecation
1.21.0+7.36.0+1.20.0+Kubernetes resource deprecation
1.22.0+7.37.0+7.37.0+Support dynamic service account token

This section includes the following topics:


Monitoring the Cluster Agent

The Datadog Agent includes an integration that automatically monitors the Cluster Agent. The integration runs on the regular Datadog Agent pod that is on the same node as the Cluster Agent. It will not run in the Cluster Agent itself. Refer to the Datadog Cluster Agent integration documentation for details.

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Introducing the Datadog Cluster AgentBLOG more more Autoscale your Kubernetes workloads with any Datadog metricBLOG more more