Cluster Agent for Kubernetes
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’re using Docker, the Datadog Cluster Agent is available on Docker Hub and GCR:
On July 10 2023, Docker Hub will start enforcing download rate limits to Datadog's Docker Hub registries. Image pulls from these registries count against your rate limit quota.
Datadog recommends that you update your Datadog Agent and Cluster Agent configuration to pull from other registries where no rate limits apply. For instructions, see Changing your container registry.
Note: To take advantage of all features from the Datadog Cluster Agent, you must run Kubernetes v1.10+.
This section includes the following topics:
Further Reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
