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.
• Leverage horizontal pod autoscaling with custom Kubernetes metrics. Refer to the dedicated guide for more details about this feature.

Note: To leverage all features from the Datadog Cluster Agent, you must run Kubernetes v1.10+.

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Introducing the Datadog Cluster AgentBLOG Autoscale your Kubernetes workloads with any Datadog metricBLOG Running Cluster Checks with AutodiscoveryDOCUMENTATION Kubernetes DaemonSet SetupDOCUMENTATION Custom IntegrationsDOCUMENTATION Troubleshooting the Datadog Cluster AgentGITHUB