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. See the guide for more details about this feature.

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

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