Use the Datadog Agent for Log Collection Only

Infrastructure Monitoring is a prerequisite to using APM. If you are an APM customer, do not turn off metric collection or you might lose critical telemetry and metric collection information.

To disable payloads, you must be running Agent v6.4+. This disables metric data submission (including Custom Metrics) so that hosts stop showing up in Datadog. Follow these steps:

  1. Open the datadog.yaml configuration file.

  2. Add the enable_payloads attribute with the following settings:

    enable_payloads:
        series: false
        events: false
        service_checks: false
        sketches: false
    
  3. Configure the Agent to collect Logs.

  4. Restart the Agent.

If you are using the Docker containerized Agent, set the DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_EVENTS, DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SERIES, DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SERVICE_CHECKS, and DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SKETCHES environment variables to false in addition to your Agent configuration:

docker run -d --name datadog-agent \
           --cgroupns host \
           --pid host \
           -e DD_API_KEY=<DATADOG_API_KEY> \
           -e DD_LOGS_ENABLED=true \
           -e DD_LOGS_CONFIG_CONTAINER_COLLECT_ALL=true \
           -e DD_CONTAINER_EXCLUDE="name:datadog-agent" \
           -e DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_EVENTS=false \
           -e DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SERIES=false \
           -e DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SERVICE_CHECKS=false \
           -e DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SKETCHES=false \
           -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
           -v /proc/:/host/proc/:ro \
           -v /opt/datadog-agent/run:/opt/datadog-agent/run:rw \
           -v /sys/fs/cgroup/:/host/sys/fs/cgroup:ro \
           gcr.io/datadoghq/agent:latest

If you are deploying the Agent in Kubernetes, set the DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_EVENTS, DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SERIES, DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SERVICE_CHECKS, and DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SKETCHES environment variables to false in addition to your Agent configuration.

 ## Send logs only
 datadog:
 [...]
   env:
      - name: DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_EVENTS
        value: "false"
      - name: DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SERIES
        value: "false"
      - name: DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SERVICE_CHECKS
        value: "false"
      - name: DD_ENABLE_PAYLOADS_SKETCHES
        value: "false"