Getting Started in Datadog

This page gives a high level overview of the capabilities for the Datadog US site and EU site.

Note: The navigation of the Datadog application switches based on browser width. It’s possible to get three different types of navigation. To change navigation types, adjust the width of your browser.

Integrations

Datadog has over 350 integrations officially listed.
Custom integrations are available via the Datadog API.
The Agent is open source.
Once integrations have been configured, all data is treated the same throughout Datadog, whether it is living in a datacenter or in an online service.

Infrastructure

All machines show up in the infrastructure list.
You can see the tags applied to each machine. Tagging allows you to indicate which machines have a particular purpose.
Datadog attempts to automatically categorize your servers. If a new machine is tagged, you can immediately see the stats for that machine based on what was previously set up for that tag. Read more on tagging.

Host Map

The Host Map can be found under the Infrastructure menu. It offers the ability to:

Quickly visualize your environment
Identify outliers
Detect usage patterns
Optimize resources

To learn more about the Host Map, visit the Host Map dedicated documentation page.

Events

The Event Stream is based on the same conventions as a blog:

Any event in the stream can be commented on.
Can be used for distributed teams and maintaining the focus of an investigation.
You can filter by user, source, tag, host, status, priority, and incident.

For each incident, users can:

Increase/decrease priority
Comment
See similar incidents
@ notify team members, who receive an email
@support-datadog to ask for assistance

Dashboards

Dashboards contain graphs with real-time performance metrics.

Synchronous mousing across all graphs in a screenboard.
Vertical bars are events. They put a metric into context.
Click and drag on a graph to zoom in on a particular timeframe.
As you hover over the graph, the event stream moves with you.
Display by zone, host, or total usage.
Datadog exposes a JSON editor for the graph, allowing for arithmetic and functions to be applied to metrics.
Share a graph snapshot that appears in the stream.
Graphs can be embedded in an iframe. This enables you to give a 3rd party access to a live graph without also giving access to your data or any other information.

Monitors

Monitors provide alerts and notifications based on metric thresholds, integration availability, network endpoints, and more.

Use any metric reporting to Datadog
Set up multi-alerts (by device, host, etc.)
Use @ in alert messages to direct notifications to the right people
Schedule downtimes to suppress notifications for system shutdowns, off-line maintenance, etc.