Installation

You can use DaemonSets to deploy the Datadog Agent on all your nodes (or on specific nodes by using nodeSelectors).

To install the Datadog Agent on your Kubernetes cluster:

1. Configure Agent permissions: If your Kubernetes has role-based access control (RBAC) enabled, configure RBAC permissions for your Datadog Agent service account. From Kubernetes 1.6 onwards, RBAC is enabled by default. Create the appropriate ClusterRole, ServiceAccount, and ClusterRoleBinding with the following command:

   kubectl apply -f "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DataDog/datadog-agent/master/Dockerfiles/manifests/rbac/clusterrole.yaml"
   
   kubectl apply -f "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DataDog/datadog-agent/master/Dockerfiles/manifests/rbac/serviceaccount.yaml"
   
   kubectl apply -f "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DataDog/datadog-agent/master/Dockerfiles/manifests/rbac/clusterrolebinding.yaml"
   

   Note: Those RBAC configurations are set for the default namespace. If you are in a custom namespace, update the namespace parameter before applying them.

2. Create the Datadog Agent manifest. Create the datadog-agent.yaml manifest out of one of the following templates:

   Metrics	Logs	APM	Process	NPM	Security	Linux	Windows
   						Manifest template	Manifest template (no security)
   						Manifest template	Manifest template
   						Manifest template	Manifest template
   						Manifest template	Manifest template
   						Manifest template	no template
   						Manifest template	Manifest template

   To enable trace collection completely, extra steps are required on your application Pod configuration. Refer also to the logs, APM, processes, and Cloud Network Monitoring, and Security documentation pages to learn how to enable each feature individually.

   Note: Those manifests are set for the default namespace. If you are in a custom namespace, update the metadata.namespace parameter before applying them.

3. In the secret-api-key.yaml manifest, replace PUT_YOUR_BASE64_ENCODED_API_KEY_HERE with your Datadog API key encoded in base64. To get the base64 version of your API key, you can run:

   echo -n '<Your API key>' | base64
   

4. If you are using the datadog-agent-all-features.yaml manifest template: in the secret-cluster-agent-token.yaml manifest, replace PUT_A_BASE64_ENCODED_RANDOM_STRING_HERE with a random string encoded in base64. To get the base64 version of it, you can run:

   echo -n 'Random string' | base64
   

   Note: The random string must contain at least 32 alphanumeric characters to secure Cluster Agent to Agent communication.

5. Set your Datadog site to using the DD_SITE environment variable in the datadog-agent.yaml manifest.

   Note: If the DD_SITE environment variable is not explicitly set, it defaults to the US site datadoghq.com. If you are using one of the other sites, this results in an invalid API key message. Use the documentation site selector to see documentation appropriate for the site you’re using.

6. Deploy the DaemonSet with the command:

   kubectl apply -f datadog-agent.yaml
   

7. Verification: To verify the Datadog Agent is running in your environment as a DaemonSet, execute:

   kubectl get daemonset
   

   If the Agent is deployed, output similar to the text below appears, where DESIRED and CURRENT are equal to the number of nodes running in your cluster.

   NAME      DESIRED   CURRENT   READY     UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   NODE SELECTOR   AGE
   datadog   2         2         2         2            2           <none>          10s
   

Configuration

Trace collection

  # (...)
  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
  # (...)

Log collection

Note: This option is not supported on Windows. Use the Helm option instead.

To enable log collection with your DaemonSet:

1. Set the DD_LOGS_ENABLED and DD_LOGS_CONFIG_CONTAINER_COLLECT_ALL variable to true in the env section of the datadog.yaml Agent manifest:

    # (...)
     env:
       # (...)
       - name: DD_LOGS_ENABLED
         value: "true"
       - name: DD_LOGS_CONFIG_CONTAINER_COLLECT_ALL
         value: "true"
       - name: DD_CONTAINER_EXCLUDE_LOGS
         value: "name:datadog-agent"
    # (...)
   

   Note: Setting DD_CONTAINER_EXCLUDE_LOGS prevents the Datadog Agent from collecting and sending its own logs. Remove this parameter if you want to collect the Datadog Agent logs. See the environment variable for ignoring containers to learn more. When using ImageStreams inside OpenShift environments, set DD_CONTAINER_INCLUDE_LOGS with the container name to collect logs. Both of these Exclude/Include parameter value supports regular expressions.

2. Mount the pointerdir volume to prevent loss of container logs during restarts or network issues and /var/lib/docker/containers to collect logs through kubernetes log file as well, since /var/log/pods is symlink to this directory:

     # (...)
       volumeMounts:
         # (...)
         - name: pointerdir
           mountPath: /opt/datadog-agent/run
         - name: logpodpath
          mountPath: /var/log/pods
         # Docker runtime directory, replace this path
         # with your container runtime logs directory,
         # or remove this configuration if `/var/log/pods`
         # is not a symlink to any other directory.
         - name: logcontainerpath
          mountPath: /var/lib/docker/containers
     # (...)
     volumes:
       # (...)
       - hostPath:
           path: /opt/datadog-agent/run
         name: pointerdir
       - hostPath:
           path: /var/log/pods
         name: logpodpath
       # Docker runtime directory, replace this path
       # with your container runtime logs directory,
       # or remove this configuration if `/var/log/pods`
       # is not a symlink to any other directory.
       - hostPath:
           path: /var/lib/docker/containers
         name: logcontainerpath
       # (...)
   

   The pointerdir is used to store a file with a pointer to all the containers that the Agent is collecting logs from. This is to make sure none are lost when the Agent is restarted, or in the case of a network issue.

Unprivileged

(Optional) To run an unprivileged installation, add the following to your pod template:

  spec:
    securityContext:
      runAsUser: <USER_ID>
      supplementalGroups:
        - <DOCKER_GROUP_ID>

where <USER_ID> is the UID to run the agent and <DOCKER_GROUP_ID> is the group ID owning the docker or containerd socket.

When the agent is running with a non-root user, it cannot directly read the log files contained in /var/lib/docker/containers. In this case, it is necessary to mount the docker socket in the agent container so that it can fetch the container logs from the docker daemon.

Cluster Agent event collection

If you want Kubernetes events to be collected by the Datadog Cluster Agent, use the following steps:

1. Disable leader election in your Node Agent by setting the leader_election variable or DD_LEADER_ELECTION environment variable to false.

2. In your Cluster Agent deployment file, set the DD_COLLECT_KUBERNETES_EVENTS and DD_LEADER_ELECTION environment variable to true:

     - name: DD_COLLECT_KUBERNETES_EVENTS
       value: "true"
     - name: DD_LEADER_ELECTION
       value: "true"
   

Configuring leader election, as described in the above steps, ensures that only one Cluster Agent collects the events.

Alternatively, to collect the Kubernetes events from a Node Agent, set the environment variables DD_COLLECT_KUBERNETES_EVENTS and DD_LEADER_ELECTION to true in your Agent manifest.

- name: DD_COLLECT_KUBERNETES_EVENTS
  value: "true"
- name: DD_LEADER_ELECTION
  value: "true"

Environment variables

The following is the list of environment variables available for the Datadog Agent using a DaemonSet.

Global options

Proxy settings

Starting with Agent v6.4.0 (and v6.5.0 for the Trace Agent), you can override the Agent proxy settings with the following environment variables:

For more information about proxy settings, see the Agent v6 Proxy documentation.

DogStatsD (custom metrics)

Send custom metrics with the StatsD protocol:

Learn more about DogStatsD over Unix Domain Sockets.

Tagging

Datadog automatically collects common tags from Kubernetes. To extract even more tags, use the following options:

See the Kubernetes Tag Extraction documentation to learn more.

Ignore containers

Exclude containers from logs collection, metrics collection, and Autodiscovery. Datadog excludes Kubernetes and OpenShift pause containers by default. These allowlists and blocklists apply to Autodiscovery only; traces and DogStatsD are not affected. These environment variables support regular expressions in their values.

Additional examples are available on the Container Discover Management page.

Note: The kubernetes.containers.running, kubernetes.pods.running, docker.containers.running, .stopped, .running.total and .stopped.total metrics are not affected by these settings. All containers are counted.

Autodiscovery

Misc