Change Tracking

Overview

Change Tracking streamlines troubleshooting and incident response by surfacing relevant changes to your service and its dependencies, enabling faster detection and remediation when issues arise.

The details of a change on the Recent Changes timeline in the Service Summary

Change Tracking supports monitoring of a range of modifications to your service and its dependencies including:

  • Deployments
  • Feature Flags
  • Database Modifications
  • Schema Changes
  • Scale Adjustments
  • Kubernetes Adjustments
  • Kubernetes Pod Crashes
  • Watchdog Alerts

For details on specific types of supported changes and setup requirements, see the Tracked changes section.

Using Change Tracking

Change Tracking is available on several pages in Datadog:

Monitor status page

View and analyze changes from the monitor status page.

Change Tracking displayed on the Monitor Status Page

Prerequisites

To use change tracking on the Monitor Status Page, ensure the appropriate service has been:

  • Specified in the monitor query.
  • Selected as part of a group.
  • Added as a service tag on the monitor.

To analyze changes from the monitor status page:

  1. Go to the monitor status page for the monitor you are analyzing.
  2. Locate the Recent Changes section.
  3. Use the Recent Changes timeline together with the Status & History graphs to correlate change events with the alert.
  4. Click the change indicator in the Recent Changes timeline to view more details about the change in the side panel.
  5. From the side panel, you can investigate more details about the change and take the following actions:
    • View the deployment in your CI/CD system.
    • View the latest commits in your repository.
    • Compare changes between deployments to identify potential issues.
    • Configure additional custom links in the deployment side panel to quickly access other resources relevant to you.

Services

View and analyze changes from the service page.

Recent Changes component within the Service Summary section with dependency changes shown

To analyze changes from the service page:

  1. Navigate to the service page you want to investigate.
  2. Locate the changes timeline in the Service Summary section.
  3. Use the dropdown to view either:
    • Changes limited to the specific service (Changes by Service)
    • Changes to the specific service and dependent services that might impact this service (Changes by Service & Dependencies)
  4. Click the change indicator to view detailed information and take remediation actions.

Dashboards

View and analyze changes from any dashboard.

Change Tracking displayed on the Dashboard

Prerequisites

To see relevant changes within the timeline and as overlays on your dashboard, ensure you have set at least one timeseries widget.

To analyze changes from dashboards:

  1. Navigate to your dashboard.
  2. Click Show Overlays at the top of the page to enable the change timeline and change overlays on supported widgets.
  3. Hover over any change indicator or overlay to view a summary of the change.
  4. Click the change indicator or overlay to view detailed information and take remediation actions.

Tracked changes

Change Tracking follows these types of changes across your infrastructure:

Change TypeTracking Requirements
Code Deployments (APM)APM & Deployment Tracking. A version must be available on the service.
Kubernetes Deployment Manifest UpdatesDatadog Agent Set Up for Kubernetes
LaunchDarkly Feature Flag EventsThird Party Datadog Integrations (LaunchDarkly only)
Custom Feature Flag EventsEvent Management API
Watchdog Alerts (Error Rate Spikes, Latency Spikes, Cloud and API Outages, etc.).See Watchdog documentation to learn more about requirements for specific Watchdog Alerts.
CrashLoopBackOff Kubernetes Pod CrashesKubernetes Integration
PostgreSQL Database Table ChangeDatabase Monitoring (DBM)
PostgreSQL Database Settings ChangeDatabase Monitoring (DBM)
Kafka Schema UpdatesData Streams Monitoring (DSM)
Manual Kubernetes Deployment Scale EventsKubernetes Audit Logging

Further reading