The Datadog Docker Agent is the containerized version of the host Agent. The official Docker image is available on Docker Hub and GCR.
Images are available for 64-bit x86 and Arm v8 architectures.
| Docker Hub | GCR |
|---|---|
Agent v6+docker pull datadog/agent | Agent v6+docker pull gcr.io/datadoghq/agent |
Agent v5docker pull datadog/docker-dd-agent | Agent v5docker pull gcr.io/datadoghq/docker-dd-agent |
If you haven’t installed the Docker Agent, follow the in-app installation instructions or see below. For supported versions, see the Agent documentation. Use the one-step install command. Replace <YOUR_DATADOG_API_KEY> with your Datadog API key.
docker run -d --name dd-agent -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro -v /proc/:/host/proc/:ro -v /sys/fs/cgroup/:/host/sys/fs/cgroup:ro -e DD_API_KEY=<DATADOG_API_KEY> gcr.io/datadoghq/agent:7
Note: If you’re using a different registry besides GCR, make sure to update the image.
For Amazon Linux < v2:
docker run -d --name dd-agent -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro -v /proc/:/host/proc/:ro -v /cgroup/:/host/sys/fs/cgroup:ro -e DD_API_KEY=<DATADOG_API_KEY> gcr.io/datadoghq/agent:7
For Amazon Linux v2:
docker run -d --name dd-agent -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro -v /proc/:/host/proc/:ro -v /sys/fs/cgroup/:/host/sys/fs/cgroup:ro -e DD_API_KEY=<DATADOG_API_KEY> gcr.io/datadoghq/agent:7
The Datadog Agent is supported in Windows Server 2019 (LTSC) and version 1909 (SAC).
docker run -d --name dd-agent -e DD_API_KEY=<API_KEY> -v \\.\pipe\docker_engine:\\.\pipe\docker_engine gcr.io/datadoghq/agent
(Optional) To run an unprivileged installation, add --group-add=<DOCKER_GROUP_ID> to the install command, for example:
docker run -d --name dd-agent -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro -v /proc/:/host/proc/:ro -v /sys/fs/cgroup/:/host/sys/fs/cgroup:ro -e DD_API_KEY=<DATADOG_API_KEY> gcr.io/datadoghq/agent:7 --group-add=<DOCKER_GROUP_ID>
Note: For Docker Compose, see Compose and the Datadog Agent.
Once the Agent is up and running, use Datadog’s Autodiscovery feature to collect metrics and logs automatically from your application containers.
The Agent’s main configuration file is datadog.yaml. For the Docker Agent, datadog.yaml configuration options are passed in with environment variables.
| Env Variable | Description |
|---|---|
DD_API_KEY | Your Datadog API key (required) |
DD_ENV | Sets the global env tag for all data emitted. |
DD_HOSTNAME | Hostname to use for metrics (if autodetection fails) |
DD_TAGS | Host tags separated by spaces. For example: simple-tag-0 tag-key-1:tag-value-1 |
DD_SITE | Destination site for your metrics, traces, and logs. Set your Datadog site to: datadoghq.com. |
DD_DD_URL | Optional setting to override the URL for metric submission. |
DD_CHECK_RUNNERS | The Agent runs all checks concurrently by default (default value = 4 runners). To run the checks sequentially, set the value to 1. If you need to run a high number of checks (or slow checks) the collector-queue component might fall behind and fail the healthcheck. You can increase the number of runners to run checks in parallel. |
Starting with Agent v6.4.0 (and v6.5.0 for the Trace Agent), you can override the Agent proxy settings with the following environment variables:
| Env Variable | Description |
|---|---|
DD_PROXY_HTTP | An HTTP URL to use as a proxy for http requests. |
DD_PROXY_HTTPS | An HTTPS URL to use as a proxy for https requests. |
DD_PROXY_NO_PROXY | A space-separated list of URLs for which no proxy should be used. |
For more information about proxy settings, see the Agent v6 Proxy documentation.
Optional collection Agents are disabled by default for security or performance reasons. Use these environment variables to enable them:
| Env Variable | Description |
|---|---|
DD_APM_ENABLED | Enable trace collection with the Trace Agent. |
DD_LOGS_ENABLED | Enable log collection with the Logs Agent. |
DD_PROCESS_AGENT_ENABLED | Enable live process collection with the Process Agent. The live container view is already enabled by default if the Docker socket is available. If set to false, the live process collection and the live container view are disabled. |
Send custom metrics with the StatsD protocol:
| Env Variable | Description |
|---|---|
DD_DOGSTATSD_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC | Listen to DogStatsD packets from other containers (required to send custom metrics). |
DD_HISTOGRAM_PERCENTILES | The histogram percentiles to compute (separated by spaces). The default is 0.95. |
DD_HISTOGRAM_AGGREGATES | The histogram aggregates to compute (separated by spaces). The default is “max median avg count”. |
DD_DOGSTATSD_SOCKET | Path to the unix socket to listen to. Must be in a rw mounted volume. |
DD_DOGSTATSD_ORIGIN_DETECTION | Enable container detection and tagging for unix socket metrics. |
DD_DOGSTATSD_TAGS | Additional tags to append to all metrics, events, and service checks received by this DogStatsD server, for example: ["env:golden", "group:retrievers"]. |
Learn more about DogStatsD over Unix Domain Sockets.
As a best practice, Datadog recommends using unified service tagging when assigning tags.
Datadog automatically collects common tags from Docker, Kubernetes, ECS, Swarm, Mesos, Nomad, and Rancher. To extract even more tags, use the following options:
| Env Variable | Description |
|---|---|
DD_DOCKER_LABELS_AS_TAGS | Extract Docker container labels |
DD_DOCKER_ENV_AS_TAGS | Extract Docker container environment variables |
DD_COLLECT_EC2_TAGS | Extract custom EC2 tags without using the AWS integration |
See the Docker Tag Extraction documentation to learn more.
Integration credentials can be stored in Docker or Kubernetes secrets and used in Autodiscovery templates. For more information, see the Secrets Management documentation.
Exclude containers from logs collection, metrics collection, and Autodiscovery. Datadog excludes Kubernetes and OpenShift pause containers by default. These allowlists and blocklists apply to Autodiscovery only; traces and DogStatsD are not affected. The value for these environment variables support regular expressions.
| Env Variable | Description |
|---|---|
DD_CONTAINER_INCLUDE | Allowlist of containers to include (separated by spaces). Use .* to include all. For example: "image:image_name_1 image:image_name_2", image:.* When using ImageStreams inside OpenShift environments, use the container name instead of image. For example:“name:container_name_1 name:container_name_2”, name:.* |
DD_CONTAINER_EXCLUDE | Blocklist of containers to exclude (separated by spaces). Use .* to exclude all. For example: "image:image_name_3 image:image_name_4" (Note: This variable is only honored for Autodiscovery.), image:.* |
DD_CONTAINER_INCLUDE_METRICS | Allowlist of containers whose metrics you wish to include. |
DD_CONTAINER_EXCLUDE_METRICS | Blocklist of containers whose metrics you wish to exclude. |
DD_CONTAINER_INCLUDE_LOGS | Allowlist of containers whose logs you wish to include. |
DD_CONTAINER_EXCLUDE_LOGS | Blocklist of containers whose logs you wish to exclude. |
DD_AC_INCLUDE | Deprecated. Allowlist of containers to include (separated by spaces). Use .* to include all. For example: "image:image_name_1 image:image_name_2", image:.* |
DD_AC_EXCLUDE | Deprecated. Blocklist of containers to exclude (separated by spaces). Use .* to exclude all. For example: "image:image_name_3 image:image_name_4" (Note: This variable is only honored for Autodiscovery.), image:.* |
Additional examples are available on the Container Discover Management page.
Note: The kubernetes.containers.running, kubernetes.pods.running, docker.containers.running, .stopped, .running.total and .stopped.total metrics are not affected by these settings. All containers are counted. This does not affect your per-container billing.
| Env Variable | Description |
|---|---|
DD_PROCESS_AGENT_CONTAINER_SOURCE | Overrides container source auto-detection to force a single source. e.g "docker", "ecs_fargate", "kubelet" |
DD_HEALTH_PORT | Set this to 5555 to expose the Agent health check at port 5555. |
You can add extra listeners and config providers using the DD_EXTRA_LISTENERS and DD_EXTRA_CONFIG_PROVIDERS environment variables. They are added in addition to the variables defined in the listeners and config_providers section of the datadog.yaml configuration file.
See the Agent Commands guides to discover all the Docker Agent commands.
By default, the Docker Agent collects metrics with the following core checks. To collect metrics from other technologies, see the Integrations section.
| Check | Metrics |
|---|---|
| CPU | System |
| Disk | Disk |
| Docker | Docker |
| File Handle | System |
| IO | System |
| Load | System |
| Memory | System |
| Network | Network |
| NTP | NTP |
| Uptime | System |
The Docker Agent sends events to Datadog when an Agent is started or restarted.
datadog.agent.up:
Returns CRITICAL if the Agent is unable to connect to Datadog, otherwise returns OK.
datadog.agent.check_status:
Returns CRITICAL if an Agent check is unable to send metrics to Datadog, otherwise returns OK.
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
