Overview

Datadog Fleet Automation allows you to centrally govern and remotely manage Datadog Agents and OpenTelemetry (OTel) Collectors at scale to support your evolving observability needs.

Use cases

For the following use cases, ensure your fleet of Datadog Agents and OTel Collectors are using the latest feature enhancements. With Fleet Automation, you gain the capabilities to:

• View the latest Agent and OTel Collector configurations along with historical changes to help confirm deployment updates and ensure configuration consistency.
• Ensure your fleet of Agents and OTel Collectors are using the latest feature enhancements by identifying and upgrading outdated versions.
• Configure your Datadog Agents directly from Fleet Automation, enabling your teams to centralize setup and get visibility into your environments faster.
• Send a support flare remotely from the Datadog UI, reducing the time it takes to debug issues on an Agent or DDOT Collector.

Setup

Remotely manage your fleet

Fleet Automation enables you to centrally manage Datadog Agents across all your hosts directly from the Datadog UI. With remote management, you can view the current state of every Agent, apply configuration changes, and roll out version upgrades without needing direct access to individual systems. This provides a consistent, controlled workflow for keeping your fleet secure, up to date, and aligned with your organization’s standards.

• Remotely Upgrade and Configure Agents: For setup and enablement steps, see Enable Remote Agent Management.
• View Agent and OTel Collector configurations:
  • The Agent and Datadog Distribution of OTel Collector (DDOT) configuration view is enabled by default in Agent versions 7.47.0 or later. To enable Agent configuration manually, set inventories_configuration_enabled in your Agent configuration file to true. Alternatively, use the DD_INVENTORIES_CONFIGURATION_ENABLED environment variable.
  • The upstream OTel Collector configuration view is enabled by setting the Datadog Extension in your collector configuration file.
• View Agent integration configuration: Agent integration configuration is enabled by default on Agent versions 7.49 or later. To enable Agent integration configuration manually, set inventories_checks_configuration_enabled in your Agent configuration file to true. Alternatively, use the environment variable DD_INVENTORIES_CHECKS_CONFIGURATION_ENABLED.

Observe your fleet

Use the Fleet Automation page to gain insight into observability gaps on your hosts, outdated Agents or OTel Collectors, and Agents with integration issues.

For each Datadog Agent, you can see:

• The Agent version
• Whether the Agent has any unconfigured or misconfigured integrations
• The services that the Agent is monitoring
• The Agent’s Remote Configuration status
• The products that are enabled on the Agent
• Agent Audit Trail events including configuration changes, upgrades and flares

For each OTel Collector, you can see:

• The Collector version
• The distribution of the Collector
• The configuration YAML of the Collector

Examine a Datadog Agent or OpenTelemetry Collector

Selecting a Datadog Agent or OTel Collector gives you more information about it, including its configuration, connected integrations, audit events, and a support tab that you can use to send a remote flare.

View Agent Audit Trail events

The Audit Events tab displays Audit Trail events associated with the selected Agent. Use this tab to:

• Identify configuration changes, API key updates, installs, upgrades and support flares.
• Determine when changes were made and from where

Audit Trail event visibility depends on your plan. When Audit Trail is enabled in your organization, you can view Agent events for up to 90 days based on your Audit Trail retention settings. If Audit Trail is not enabled in your organization, you can view the past 24 hours of events.

Send a remote flare

You can send a flare from the Datadog Agent or DDOT Collector after enabling Remote Configuration on the Agent. For instructions on sending a flare, see Send a flare from the Datadog site.

When contacting Datadog Support with Remote Configuration enabled for an Agent, the Support team may initiate a flare from your environment in order to better assist you in a timely manner. Flares provide troubleshooting information to Datadog Support to help you resolve your issue.

Control access to Fleet Automation

Fleet Automation is available to all users in a Datadog organization. You can control access to specific functionality:

For information on setting up roles and permissions, see Access Control.

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Manage all your OpenTelemetry collectors with Datadog Fleet AutomationBLOG Centralize and govern your OpenTelemetry pipeline with the DDOT gatewayBLOG Find out more about Remote ConfigurationDOCUMENTATION Learn about the Agent configuration viewDOCUMENTATION Centrally govern and remotely manage Datadog Agents at scale with Fleet AutomationBLOG