Overview

The Metrics Summary page displays a list of your metrics reported to Datadog under a specified time frame: the past hour, day, or week.

Search your metrics by metric name or tag using the Metric or Tag search fields:

Tag filtering supports Boolean and wildcard syntax so that you can identify:

• Metrics that are tagged with a particular tag key, for example, team: team:*
• Metrics that are missing a particular tag key, for example, team: NOT team:*

Facet panel

The search bars provide the most comprehensive set of actions to filter the list of metrics. But facets can also filter your metrics by:

• Configuration: Metrics with tag configurations
• Percentiles: Distribution metrics enabled by percentiles/advanced query capabilities
• Historical Metrics: Metrics that have historical metrics ingestion enabled
• Query Activity: Metrics not queried in Datadog or by the API in the past 30, 60, or 90 days
• Related Assets: Metrics that are being used on dashboards, notebooks, monitors, and SLOs
• Metric Type: Differentiate between distribution and non-distribution metrics (counts, gauges, rates)
• Metric Origin: The product from which the metric originated (for example, metrics generated from Logs or APM Spans). To learn more about the different metric origin types, see Metric origin definitions

Definitions

A metric is unqueried if it has not been accessed in monitors, SLOs, executed notebooks, opened dashboards, used in Metrics Explorer queries, or accessed through API calls within the past 30, 60, or 90 days.

A metric is considered used as long as it exists on an asset, regardless if it has been actively queried.

Configuration of multiple metrics

Clicking Configure Metrics gives you multiple options to configure more than one metric at a time:

• Manage tags: Configure tags on multiple custom metrics matching a namespace using Metrics without Limits™.

• Enable or disable percentiles: Manage percentile aggregations across multiple distribution metrics. See the Distributions page for more information.

• Enable or disable historical metrics ingestion: Manage the ingestion of historical metric data. See the Historical Metrics Ingestion page for more information.

Metric details sidepanel

Click on any metric name to display its details sidepanel for more information regarding the metric’s metadata and tags:

Metric name

The name of your metric in the Metrics Explorer, dashboards, etc.

Ingested custom metrics

A metric name may emit multiple ingested custom metrics depending on its associated tag value combinations. Ingested custom metrics represent all of the data originally submitted with code.

Learn more in the custom metrics documentation.

Indexed custom metrics

Unlike ingested custom metrics, indexed custom metrics represent those that remain queryable across the Datadog platform. This number may be impacted by adding or removing percentile aggregations or by use of Metrics without Limits™. Learn more in the Metrics without Limits™ documentation.

Hosts

The total number of hosts reporting a metric.

Tag values

The total number of unique tag values attached to a metric.

Learn more about tagging.

Metrics metadata

The metadata attached to your metric. Most of the metadata can be edited on the metric summary page or with the Datadog API.

Metric unit

The unit for your metric (byte, second, request, query, etc.). See the metric unit page for more details.

When submitting custom metrics to Datadog, it is possible to change the unit of measurement that displays when hovering over the metric in your graph.

Note: This does not change how a metric graph is displayed. It only changes the units of measurement that raw values are considered as when you hover over a metric. Formatting is automatically applied for readability. For example, bytes (B) may be displayed as kilobytes (KiB).

Metric type

The type for your metric (gauge, rate, count, distribution). See the metric type page for more details.

Warning: Editing the metric type changes that metric’s behavior for ALL your dashboards and monitors.

Integration name

If the metric is coming from a supported integration, the metadata lists the integration name. This information cannot be edited.

Interval

The collection interval for the metric in seconds.

Metric description

The metric description helps you understand what a metric does. Descriptions are pre-populated for metrics coming from supported integrations. Use this field to update the descriptions for your custom metrics.

Tags table

The tags table offers multiple ways to explore all of the tag keys and tag values that are actively reporting in your metric’s data.

Use the tags table to:

• Sort tag keys by the Count column (count of unique tag values).
• Search through the paginated table of tags for a particular tag key.
• Export the tags table as a downloadable CSV.
• Toggle between tags you’ve configured on your metric vs the metric’s originally submitted tags

For any particular tag key, you can:

• Inspect all tag values of that tag key.
• Use a specific tag key:value to further filter the list of metrics displayed on the Metrics Summary page.
• Open a graph of this metric filtered by your tag key:value pair in the Metrics Explorer.
• Copy any tag key:value for filtering across the application.

Learn more about tagging.

Metrics Related Assets

To determine the value of any metric name to your organization, use Metrics Related Assets. Metrics related assets refers to any dashboard, notebook, monitor, or SLO that queries a particular metric.

1. Scroll to the bottom of the metric’s details side panel to the Related Assets section.
2. Click the dropdown button to view the type of related asset you are interested in (dashboards, monitors, notebooks, SLOs). You can additionally use the search bar to validate specific assets.

Custom Metrics Tags Cardinality Explorer

To determine why a particular metric name is emitting a large number of custom metrics, or spiking, use the Custom Metrics Tags Cardinality Explorer. This helps you pinpoint the tag keys driving the spike, which you can immediately exclude using Metrics without Limits™ for cost savings.

Metrics without Limits™

Metrics without Limits™ provides you control over the size of your custom metrics without requiring any agent or code-level changes.

Note: Metrics without Limits™ is only available for custom metrics.

You can configure tags in bulk by going to Configure Metrics -> Manage tags in the Metrics page, or by clicking the Manage Tags button in a metric’s details side panel.

1. Click on your custom distribution metric name in the Metrics Summary table to open the metrics details side panel.
2. Click the Manage Tags button to open the tag configuration modal.
3. Select Include tags… or Exclude tags… to customize the tags you do or don’t want to query for. For more information on tag configuration, see the Metrics without Limits documentation.
4. Preview the effects of your proposed tag configuration with the cardinality estimator before selecting Save.

Note: The cardinality estimator requires the metric to be older than 48 hours.

Queryable tags

Once your metric has been configured with Metrics without Limits™, you can view which tags remain Queryable – ultimately those that contribute to Indexed Custom Metrics volume. And you can toggle back to all originally submitted and ingested tags that contribute to your Ingested Custom Metrics volume.

Metric origin definitions

This table shows the mapping between the metric origin as seen in the facet and where it was submitted from:

Further reading