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.
• Use Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) with custom Kubernetes metrics and external metrics. See the Autoscaling on custom and external metrics guide for more details.

If you installed the Datadog Agent using Helm chart v2.7.0 or Datadog Operator v1.0.0+, the Datadog Cluster Agent is enabled by default.

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

Minimum Agent and Cluster Agent versions

Some features related to later Kubernetes versions require a minimum Datadog Agent version.

Further Reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Introducing the Datadog Cluster AgentBLOG Autoscale your Kubernetes workloads with any Datadog metricBLOG