You can configure your Vertica integration to collect metrics from custom queries of your Vertica database by following the configuration syntax in these lines of the Datadog Vertica integration’s conf.yaml.example file. While you do this, there are a few things you want to keep in mind.

Custom query format

Define custom queries in the following format:

custom_queries:
  - query: <QUERY>
    columns: <COLUMNS>
    tags: <TAGS>

Queries in Vertica resemble the same SQL queries used in other databases. Use the pipe symbol (|) in the query field to use a multi line query.

The columns field is a list representing each column, ordered sequentially from left to right. The number of columns must equal the number of columns returned in the query. Each column requires two pieces of data: name and type:

• The name field represents the suffix to append to vertica. in order to form the full metric name.
• The type field represents the submission method: gauge, monotonic_count, etc. Setting the type to tag results in tagging each metric in the row with the name and value of the item in this column.

The tags field is optional and represents a list of tags to apply to each metric.

Example

custom_queries:
  - query: |
      SELECT force_outer,
             table_name
      FROM v_catalog.tables
    columns:
      - name: table.force_outer
        type: gauge
      - name: table_name
        type: tag
    tags:
      - env:dev

Global custom queries

You can define custom queries at the instance level, but if you wish to apply certain queries across all instances, use the global_custom_queries parameter in the init_config section.

In each instance, you can define the behavior of global custom queries using the use_global_custom_queries parameter. This value defaults to true.