Autodiscovery container identifiers, or ad_identifiers, allow you to apply an Autodiscovery configuration file template to a given container, either by using the container image name, or by using a custom Autodiscovery container identifier.

Even if Autodiscovery configuration is defined within a custom configuration file, you can use the standard labels for tagging env, service, and version. See Unified Service Tagging for more information on how to configure these labels on your containers.

Note: Other configuration types, including key-value stores, Docker labels, or Kubernetes pod annotations, use a different method to match integration configuration templates to their corresponding containers. For those configuration types, the matching between an integration configuration template and the container is based on the <CONTAINER_IDENTIFIER> included in the key-value stores, labels, or annotations.

Container image name

To apply the following Autodiscovery configuration template to a given container, use the container image short name as the <INTEGRATION_AUTODISCOVERY_IDENTIFIER>:

ad_identifiers:
  <INTEGRATION_AUTODISCOVERY_IDENTIFIER>

init_config:
  <INIT_CONFIG>

instances:
  <INSTANCES_CONFIG>

Example: The following Apache Autodiscovery configuration template applies to a container image named httpd:

ad_identifiers:
  - httpd
init_config:
instances:
  - apache_status_url: http://%%host%%/server-status?auto
logs:
  source: apache
  service: webapp

This matches any httpd container image on your host. If you have one container running foo/httpd:latest and another running bar/httpd:v2, the Agent applies the above template to both containers.

When using short image names as Autodiscovery container identifiers, the Agent cannot distinguish between identically named images from different sources or with different tags.

Multiple identifiers

Specify multiple image names by adding to the ad_identifiers list, for example:

ad_identifiers:
  - httpd
  - my-custom-httpd-image

This matches any container images on your host that match httpd or my-custom-httpd-image.

Custom Autodiscovery container identifiers

To apply different Autodiscovery configuration templates to containers running the same image, choose a custom value to supply as <INTEGRATION_AUTODISCOVERY_IDENTIFIER>. Then, apply a Docker label or Kubernetes annotation to your container that contains this custom value.

Example: The following Apache Autodiscovery configuration template designates a container image with the custom name foo:

ad_identifiers:
  - foo
init_config:
instances:
  - apache_status_url: http://%%host%%/server-status?auto
logs:
  source: apache
  service: webapp

Then, apply a Docker label or Kubernetes annotation to identify your container as foo:

LABEL com.datadoghq.ad.check.id="foo"

ad.datadoghq.com/<CONTAINER_IDENTIFIER>.check.id: <INTEGRATION_AUTODISCOVERY_IDENTIFIER>

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Create and load an Autodiscovery Integration TemplateDOCUMENTATION Manage which Container to include in the Agent AutodiscoveryDOCUMENTATION