Overview

The Agent, by default, logs in INFO level. You can set the log level to DEBUG to get more information from your logs.

Note: Debug mode is meant for debugging purposes only. Datadog recommends only enabling DEBUG for a certain window of time as it increases the number of indexed logs. Set the log level back to INFO when done.

To enable the Agent full debug mode:

1. Modify your local datadog.conf file. See Agent main configuration file for OS specific details.
2. Replace # log_level: INFO with log_level: DEBUG (remove # to uncomment the line).
3. Restart the Datadog Agent. See Agent Commands for OS specific details.
4. Wait a few minutes to generate some logs. See Agent Log Files for OS specific details.

Containerized Agent

When run in a container, the Agent cannot be restarted with service datadog-agent restart (or similar) which causes the container to be killed by Docker. Use supervisor to restart a containerized Agent:

/opt/datadog-agent/bin/supervisorctl -c /etc/dd-agent/supervisor.conf restart all

With the following commands, enable debug logging, restart the Agent, wait 60 seconds, then send a flare, in that order:

sed -i '/\[Main\]/a LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG' /etc/dd-agent/datadog.conf
/opt/datadog-agent/bin/supervisorctl -c /etc/dd-agent/supervisor.conf restart all
sleep 60
/etc/init.d/datadog-agent flare <CASE_ID>

Debug logs can be disabled with:

sed -i '/LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG/d' /etc/dd-agent/datadog.conf
/opt/datadog-agent/bin/supervisorctl -c /etc/dd-agent/supervisor.conf restart all

Or the container can be restarted.

Agent log level

The following Agent log levels are available for log_level or DD_LOG_LEVEL:

Note: When setting the log level to 'OFF' in the configuration file, quotes are mandatory to prevent the value from being improperly parsed. Quotes are optional for other log levels.