Dogwrap

The Dogwrap command line tool allows you to call commands and generate events from their results. In order to use Dogwrap, install the Datadog Python Library:

To install from pip:

pip install datadog

To install from source:

  1. Clone the DataDog/datadogpy repository.
  2. Inside the root folder, run python setup.py install.

The minimum valid dogwrap command has the following layout:

dogwrap -n <EVENT_TITLE> -k <DATADOG_API_KEY> "<COMMAND>"


dogwrap -n <EVENT_TITLE> -k <DATADOG_API_KEY> -s us3 "<COMMAND>"


dogwrap -n <EVENT_TITLE> -k <DATADOG_API_KEY> -s us5 "<COMMAND>"


dogwrap -n <EVENT_TITLE> -k <DATADOG_API_KEY> -s eu "<COMMAND>"

Note: The dogwrap command sends data to the US Datadog site by default. If you need to send data to another site, you must include the -s option specifying a target site, such as eu, us3, us5, etc.

With the following placeholders:

  • <EVENT_TITLE>: Title of the event to display in Datadog.
  • <DATADOG_API_KEY>: The Datadog API key associated with your organization.
  • <COMMAND>: Command to wrap and generate events from. Enclose your called command in quotes to prevent Python from thinking the command line arguments belong to the Python command instead of the wrapped one.

Note: Use the Dogwrap help command dogwrap --help to discover all available options.

For an example of dogwrap in action, consider cron. If you have a cron script to vacuum a Postgres table every day:

0 0 * * * psql -c 'vacuum verbose my_table' >> /var/log/postgres_vacuums.log 2>&1

Vacuuming is particularly resource-intensive, so you might want Datadog events for each time they run to correlate metrics and other events with vacuums:

dogwrap -n "Vacuuming mytable" -k $DATADOG_API_KEY --submit_mode errors "psql -c 'vacuum verbose my_table' 2>&1 /var/log/postgres_vacuums.log"

This calls the command at the end of the script and, if it exits with a non-zero exit code (like an error), sends Datadog events. Using --submit_mode all sends events on every run of this command.