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In order to start collecting your application traces you must be running the Datadog Agent in your Kubernetes cluster.
You can configure the Agent to intake traces by using TCP (IP:Port
), Unix Domain Socket (UDS), or both. The Agent can receive traces from both setups at the same time if needed.
The default configuration creates a directory on the host and mounts it within the Agent. The Agent then creates and listens on a socket file /var/run/datadog/apm.socket
. The application pods can then similarly mount this volume and write to this same socket. You can modify the path and socket with the datadog.apm.hostSocketPath
and datadog.apm.socketPath
configuration values.
This feature can be disabled with datadog.apm.socketEnabled
.
The Datadog Agent can also be configured to receive traces over TCP. To enable this feature:
values.yaml
file with the following APM configuration:datadog:
## Enable apm agent and provide custom configs
apm:
# datadog.apm.portEnabled -- Enable APM over TCP communication (port 8126 by default)
## ref: https://docs.datadoghq.com/agent/kubernetes/apm/
portEnabled: true
Then, upgrade your Datadog Helm chart using the following command: helm upgrade -f values.yaml <RELEASE NAME> datadog/datadog
. If you did not set your operating system in values.yaml
, add --set targetSystem=linux
or --set targetSystem=windows
to this command.
Warning: The datadog.apm.portEnabled
parameter opens a port on your host. Make sure your firewall only allows access from your applications or trusted sources. If your network plugin doesn’t support hostPorts
, add hostNetwork: true
in your Agent pod specifications. This shares the network namespace of your host with the Datadog Agent. This also means that all ports opened on the container are opened on the host. If a port is used both on the host and in your container, they conflict (since they share the same network namespace) and the pod does not start. Some Kubernetes installations do not allow this.
To enable APM trace collection, open the DaemonSet configuration file and edit the following:
Allow incoming data from port 8126
(forwarding traffic from the host to the agent) within the trace-agent
container:
# (...)
containers:
- name: trace-agent
# (...)
ports:
- containerPort: 8126
hostPort: 8126
name: traceport
protocol: TCP
# (...)
If using an old agent version (7.17 or lower), in addition to the steps above, set the DD_APM_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC
and DD_APM_ENABLED
variable to true
in your env
section of the datadog.yaml
trace Agent manifest:
# (...)
containers:
- name: trace-agent
# (...)
env:
- name: DD_APM_ENABLED
value: 'true'
- name: DD_APM_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC
value: "true"
# (...)
Warning: The hostPort
parameter opens a port on your host. Make sure your firewall only allows access from your applications or trusted sources. If your network plugin doesn’t support hostPorts
, add hostNetwork: true
in your Agent pod specifications. This shares the network namespace of your host with the Datadog Agent. This also means that all ports opened on the container are opened on the host. If a port is used both on the host and in your container, they conflict (since they share the same network namespace) and the pod does not start. Some Kubernetes installations do not allow this.
To enable APM trace collection, open the DaemonSet configuration file and edit the following:
# (...)
containers:
- name: trace-agent
# (...)
env:
- name: DD_APM_ENABLED
value: "true"
- name: DD_APM_RECEIVER_SOCKET
value: "/var/run/datadog/apm.socket"
# (...)
volumeMounts:
- name: apmsocket
mountPath: /var/run/datadog/
volumes:
- hostPath:
path: /var/run/datadog/
type: DirectoryOrCreate
# (...)
This configuration creates a directory on the host and mounts it within the Agent. The Agent then creates and listens on a socket file in that directory with the DD_APM_RECEIVER_SOCKET
value of /var/run/datadog/apm.socket
. The application pods can then similarly mount this volume and write to this same socket.
The default configuration creates a directory on the host and mounts it within the Agent. The Agent then creates and listens on a socket file /var/run/datadog/apm.socket
. The application pods can then similarly mount this volume and write to this same socket. You can modify the path and socket with the agent.apm.hostSocketPath
and agent.apm.socketPath
configuration values.
The Datadog Agent can also be configured to receive traces over TCP. To enable this feature:
Update your datadog-agent.yaml
manifest with the following:
agent:
image:
name: "gcr.io/datadoghq/agent:latest"
apm:
enabled: true
hostPort: 8126
site: <DATADOG_SITE>
Where your <DATADOG_SITE>
is (defaults to
datadoghq.com
).
See the sample manifest with APM and metrics collection enabled for a complete example.
Then apply the new configuration:
$ kubectl apply -n $DD_NAMESPACE -f datadog-agent.yaml
Warning: The hostPort
parameter opens a port on your host. Make sure your firewall only allows access from your applications or trusted sources. If your network plugin doesn’t support hostPorts
, add hostNetwork: true
in your Agent pod specifications. This shares the network namespace of your host with the Datadog Agent. This also means that all ports opened on the container are opened on the host. If a port is used both on the host and in your container, they conflict (since they share the same network namespace) and the pod does not start. Some Kubernetes installations do not allow this.
Note: On minikube, you may receive an Unable to detect the kubelet URL automatically
error. In this case, set DD_KUBELET_TLS_VERIFY=false
.
Datadog Admission Controller is able to inject environment variables and mount the necessary volumes on new application-pods in order to configure pod and agent trace communication automatically.
To learn more on how to automatically configure you application to submit traces to Datadog Agent read the Datadog Admission Controller documentation.
If you are sending traces to the Agent by using Unix Domain Socket (UDS), mount the host directory the socket is in (that the Agent created) to the application container and specify the path to the socket with DD_TRACE_AGENT_URL
:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
#(...)
spec:
containers:
- name: "<CONTAINER_NAME>"
image: "<CONTAINER_IMAGE>/<TAG>"
env:
- name: DD_TRACE_AGENT_URL
value: 'unix:///var/run/datadog/apm.socket'
volumeMounts:
- name: apmsocketpath
mountPath: /var/run/datadog
#(...)
volumes:
- hostPath:
path: /var/run/datadog/
name: apmsocketpath
If you are sending traces to the Agent by using TCP (<IP_ADDRESS>:8126
) supply this IP address to your application pods—either automatically with the Datadog Admission Controller, or manually using the downward API to pull the host IP. The application container needs the DD_AGENT_HOST
environment variable that points to status.hostIP
:
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
#(...)
spec:
containers:
- name: "<CONTAINER_NAME>"
image: "<CONTAINER_IMAGE>/<TAG>"
env:
- name: DD_AGENT_HOST
valueFrom:
fieldRef:
fieldPath: status.hostIP
Note: This configuration requires the Agent to be configured to accept traces over TCP
After configuring your Datadog Agent to collect traces and giving your application pods the configuration on where to send traces, install the Datadog Tracer into your applications to emit the traces. Once this is done, the tracer automatically sends the traces to the relative DD_AGENT_HOST
(for IP:Port
) or DD_TRACE_AGENT_URL
(for UDS) endpoint.
Refer to the language-specific APM instrumentation docs for more examples.
Note: The PHP tracer does not support sending traces over Unix Domain Socket (UDS). For updates on UDS for PHP, contact support.
Note: As a best practice, Datadog recommends using unified service tagging when assigning tags. Unified service tagging ties Datadog telemetry together through the use of three standard tags: env
, service
, and version
. To learn how to configure your environment with unified tagging, refer to the dedicated unified service tagging documentation.
List of all environment variables available for tracing within the Agent running in Kubernetes:
Environment variable | Description |
---|---|
DD_API_KEY | Datadog API Key |
DD_PROXY_HTTPS | Set up the URL for the proxy to use. |
DD_APM_REPLACE_TAGS | Scrub sensitive data from your span’s tags. |
DD_HOSTNAME | Manually set the hostname to use for metrics if autodetection fails, or when running the Datadog Cluster Agent. |
DD_DOGSTATSD_PORT | Set the DogStatsD port. |
DD_APM_RECEIVER_SOCKET | Collect your traces through a Unix Domain Sockets and takes priority over hostname and port configuration if set. Off by default, when set it must point to a valid sock file. |
DD_BIND_HOST | Set the StatsD & receiver hostname. |
DD_LOG_LEVEL | Set the logging level. (trace /debug /info /warn /error /critical /off ) |
DD_APM_ENABLED | When set to true , the Datadog Agent accepts trace metrics. Default value is true (Agent 7.18+) |
DD_APM_CONNECTION_LIMIT | Sets the maximum connection limit for a 30 second time window. |
DD_APM_DD_URL | Set the Datadog API endpoint where your traces are sent: https://trace.agent. . Defaults to https://trace.agent.datadoghq.com . |
DD_APM_RECEIVER_PORT | Port that the Datadog Agent’s trace receiver listens on. Default value is 8126 . |
DD_APM_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC | Allow non-local traffic when tracing from other containers. Default value is true (Agent 7.18+) |
DD_APM_IGNORE_RESOURCES | Configure resources for the Agent to ignore. Format should be comma separated, regular expressions. Like GET /ignore-me,(GET|POST) /and-also-me . |
DD_ENV | Sets the global env for all data emitted by the Agent. If env is not present in your trace data, this variable is used. See APM environment setup for more details. |
Environment variable | Description |
---|---|
agent.apm.enabled | Enable this to enable APM and tracing, on port 8126. See the Datadog Docker documentation. |
agent.apm.env | The Datadog Agent supports many environment variables. |
agent.apm.hostPort | Number of port to expose on the host. If specified, this must be a valid port number, 0 < x < 65536. If HostNetwork is specified, this must match ContainerPort . Most containers do not need this. |
agent.apm.resources.limits | Limits describes the maximum amount of compute resources allowed. For more info, see the Kubernetes documentation. |
agent.apm.resources.requests | Requests describes the minimum amount of compute resources required. If requests is omitted for a container, it defaults to limits if that is explicitly specified, otherwise to an implementation-defined value. For more info, see the Kubernetes documentation. |
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles: