The Datadog Agent can create and assign tags to all metrics, traces, and logs emitted by a container based on its labels or environment variables.
Out-of-the-box tags
The Agent can autodiscover and attach tags to all data emitted by the entire task or an individual container within this task. The list of tags attached automatically depends on the agent cardinality configuration.
Tag
Cardinality
Source
container_name
High
Docker
container_id
High
Docker
docker_image
Low
Docker
image_name
Low
Docker
short_image
Low
Docker
image_tag
Low
Docker
ecs_cluster_name
Low
ECS API
ecs_container_name
Low
ECS API
task_arn
Orchestrator
ECS API
task_family
Low
ECS API
task_name
Low
ECS API
task_version
Low
ECS API
Unified service tagging
As a best practice in containerized environments, Datadog recommends using unified service tagging when assigning tags. Unified service tagging ties Datadog telemetry together through the use of three standard tags: env, service, and version. To learn how to configure your environment with unified tagging, see the Amazon ECS unified service tagging documentation.
Resource tag collection
If you do not have unified service tagging enabled, complete the following steps to collect ECS resource tags:
Verify your Amazon ECS container instances are associated with an IAM role. This can be done when creating a new cluster with the ECS cluster creation wizard or in the launch configuration used by an autoscaling group.
Update your datadog-agent-ecs.json file (datadog-agent-ecs1.json if you are using an original Amazon Linux AMI) to enable resource tag collection by adding the following environment variable:
