Prerequisites

Before setting up Code Security, ensure the following prerequisites are met:

  1. Datadog Agent Installation: The Datadog Agent is installed and configured for your application’s operating system or container, cloud, or virtual environment.
  2. Datadog APM Configuration: Datadog APM is configured for your application or service, and traces are being received by Datadog.
  3. Supported Tracing Library: The Datadog Tracing Library used by your application or service supports Code Security capabilities for the language of your application or service. For more details, refer to the Library Compatibility page.

Code Security Enablement Types

There are two main approaches to enable Code Security on your tracing libraries: Single-Step Instrumentation and Datadog Tracing Libraries.

Single-Step Instrumentation

Run a one-line install command to install the Datadog Agent, and enable Code Security with Single-Step Instrumentation.

Datadog Tracing Libraries

Add an environment variable or a new argument to your Datadog Tracing Library configuration.

By following these steps, you’ll successfully set up Code Security for your application or service, ensuring comprehensive monitoring and identification of code-level vulnerabilities at runtime.

Enabling Code Security using single step instrumentation

Enabling Code Security using single step instrumentation is in beta.

Requirements

  • Minimum Agent version 7.53.0
  • Minimum Datadog Helm chart version 3.62.0 (for Kubernetes deployments).
  • Languages and architectures: Single step instrumentation for Code Security only supports tracing Java, Node.js, .NET Core services on x86_64 and arm64 architectures, and Python (support available in private beta).
  • Operating systems: Linux VMs (Debian, Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, CentOS/Red Hat, Fedora), Docker, Kubernetes clusters with Linux containers.

Enabling in one step

If you install or update a Datadog Agent with the Enable Code Security option selected, the Agent is installed and configured to enable detection of code-level vulnerabilities in your applications. This allows you to automatically instrument your application, without any additional installation or configuration steps. Restart services for this instrumentation to take effect.

Account settings Ubuntu setup page highlighting the toggle for Enabling APM instrumentation and ASM for Code Security.

The following examples show how it works on each infrastructure type.

With one command, you can install, configure, and start the Agent, while also instrumenting your services with Application Security options.

For an Ubuntu host:

  1. Run the one-line installation command:

    DD_API_KEY=<YOUR_DD_API_KEY> DD_SITE="<YOUR_DD_SITE>" DD_APM_INSTRUMENTATION_ENABLED=host DD_IAST_ENABLED=true bash -c "$(curl -L https://install.datadoghq.com/scripts/install_script_agent7.sh)"
    

    a. Replace <YOUR_DD_API_KEY> with your Datadog API key.

    b. Replace <YOUR_DD_SITE> with your Datadog site.

  2. Exit your current shell session.

  3. Start a new shell session.

  4. Restart the services on the host or VM.

  5. Explore the performance observability of your services in Datadog.

Note: To configure single-step for both Code Security and Threat Protection, add both the DD_IAST_ENABLED=true and DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true environment variables to your one-line installation command.

Specifying tracing library versions

By default, enabling APM on your server installs support for Java, Node.js, .NET Core, and Python services. If you only have services implemented in some of these languages, set DD_APM_INSTRUMENTATION_LIBRARIES in your one-line installation command:

DD_APM_INSTRUMENTATION_LIBRARIES="java:1.25.0,python" DD_API_KEY=<YOUR_DD_API_KEY> DD_SITE="<YOUR_DD_SITE>" DD_APM_INSTRUMENTATION_ENABLED=host DD_IAST_ENABLED=true  DD_ENV=staging bash -c "$(curl -L https://install.datadoghq.com/scripts/install_script_agent7.sh)"

You can optionally provide a version number for the tracing library by placing a colon after the language name and specifying the tracing library version. If you don’t specify a version, it defaults to the latest version. Language names are comma-separated.

Supported languages include:

  • Java (java)
  • Node.js (js)
  • .NET (dotnet)
  • Python (python)

Note: For the Node.js tracing library, different versions of Node.js are compatible with different versions of the Node.js tracing library. See DataDog/dd-trace-js: JavaScript APM Tracer for more information.

Tagging observability data by environment

Set DD_ENV in your one-line installation command for Linux to automatically tag instrumented services and other telemetry that pass through the Agent with a specific environment. For example, if the Agent is installed in your staging environment, set DD_ENV=staging to associate your observability data with staging.

For example:

DD_API_KEY=<YOUR_DD_API_KEY> DD_SITE="<YOUR_DD_SITE>" DD_APM_INSTRUMENTATION_ENABLED=host DD_IAST_ENABLED=true DD_ENV=staging bash -c "$(curl -L https://install.datadoghq.com/scripts/install_script_agent7.sh)"

For a Docker Linux container:

  1. Install the library injector:

    DD_IAST_ENABLED=true DD_APM_INSTRUMENTATION_ENABLED=docker DD_NO_AGENT_INSTALL=true bash -c "$(curl -L https://install.datadoghq.com/scripts/install_script_agent7.sh)"
    
  2. Configure the Agent in Docker:

    docker run -d --name dd-agent \
      -e DD_API_KEY=${YOUR_DD_API_KEY} \
      -e DD_SITE=${YOUR_DD_SITE} \
      -e DD_APM_ENABLED=true \
      -e DD_APM_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC=true \
      -e DD_APM_RECEIVER_SOCKET=/var/run/datadog/apm.socket \
      -e DD_DOGSTATSD_SOCKET=/var/run/datadog/dsd.socket \
      -v /var/run/datadog:/var/run/datadog \
      -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
      -v /proc/:/host/proc/:ro \
      -v /sys/fs/cgroup/:/host/sys/fs/cgroup:ro \
      -v /var/lib/docker/containers:/var/lib/docker/containers:ro \
      gcr.io/datadoghq/agent:7
    

    a. Replace <YOUR_DD_API_KEY> with your Datadog API.

    b. Replace <YOUR_DD_SITE> with your Datadog site.

  3. Restart the Docker containers.

  4. Explore the performance observability of your services in Datadog.

Specifying tracing library versions

By default, enabling APM on your server installs support for Java, Python, Node.js, and .NET services. If you only have services implemented in some of these languages, set DD_APM_INSTRUMENTATION_LIBRARIES when running the installation script.

For example, to install support for only v1.25.0 of the Java tracing library and the latest Python tracing library, add the following to the installation command:

DD_APM_INSTRUMENTATION_LIBRARIES="java:1.25.0,python" bash -c "$(curl -L https://install.datadoghq.com/scripts/install_script_docker_injection.sh)"

You can optionally provide a version number for the tracing library by placing a colon after the language name and specifying the tracing library version. If you don’t specify a version, it defaults to the latest version. Language names are comma-separated.

Supported languages include:

  • Java (java)
  • Node.js (js)
  • .NET (dotnet)
  • Python (python)

Note: For the Node.js tracing library, different versions of Node.js are compatible with different versions of the Node.js tracing library. See DataDog/dd-trace-js: JavaScript APM Tracer for more information.

Tagging observability data by environment

Set DD_ENV in the library injector installation command for Docker to automatically tag instrumented services and other telemetry that pass through the Agent with a specific environment. For example, if the Agent is installed in your staging environment, set DD_ENV=staging to associate your observability data with staging.

For example:

docker run -d --name dd-agent \
  -e DD_API_KEY=${YOUR_DD_API_KEY} \
  -e DD_APM_ENABLED=true \
  -e DD_ENV=staging \
  -e DD_APM_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC=true \
  -e DD_DOGSTATSD_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC=true \
  -e DD_APM_RECEIVER_SOCKET=/opt/datadog/apm/inject/run/apm.socket \
  -e DD_DOGSTATSD_SOCKET=/opt/datadog/apm/inject/run/dsd.socket \
  -v /opt/datadog/apm:/opt/datadog/apm \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro \
  gcr.io/datadoghq/agent:7

You can enable APM by installing the Agent with the Datadog Helm chart. This deploys the Datadog Agent across all nodes in your Linux-based Kubernetes cluster with a DaemonSet.

Single step instrumentation doesn't instrument applications in the namespace where you install the Datadog Agent. It's recommended to install the Agent in a separate namespace in your cluster where you don't run your applications.

Requirements

  • Make sure you have Helm installed.

Installation

To enable single step instrumentation with Helm:

  1. Add the Helm Datadog repo:

     helm repo add datadog https://helm.datadoghq.com
     helm repo update
    
  2. Create a Kubernetes Secret to store your Datadog API key:

    kubectl create secret generic datadog-secret --from-literal api-key=$DD_API_KEY
    
  3. Create datadog-values.yaml and add the following configuration:

    datadog:
     apiKeyExistingSecret: datadog-secret
     site: <DATADOG_SITE>
     apm:
       instrumentation:
          enabled: true
     asm:
       iast:
         enabled: true
    

    Replace <DATADOG_SITE> with your Datadog site.

  4. Run the following command:

    helm install datadog-agent -f datadog-values.yaml datadog/datadog
    
  5. Do a rolling restart on your applications for instrumentation to take effect.

For more information on Kubernetes single step instrumentation, see the following:

Removing Single Step APM and Application Security instrumentation from your Agent

If you don’t want to collect trace data for a particular service, host, VM, or container, complete the follow steps:

Removing instrumentation for specific services

Run the following commands and restart the service to stop injecting the library into the service and stop producing traces from that service.

  1. Add the DD_INSTRUMENT_SERVICE_WITH_APM environment variable to the service startup command:

    DD_INSTRUMENT_SERVICE_WITH_APM=false <service_start_command>
    
  2. Restart the service.

  3. To disable Code Security, remove the DD_IAST_ENABLED=true environment variable from your application configuration, and restart your service.

  1. Add the DD_INSTRUMENT_SERVICE_WITH_APM environment variable to the service startup command:

    docker run -e DD_INSTRUMENT_SERVICE_WITH_APM=false <service_start_command>
    
  2. Restart the service.

  3. To disable Code Security, remove the DD_IAST_ENABLED=true environment variable from your application configuration, and restart your service.

  1. Set the admission.datadoghq.com/enabled: label to "false" for the pod spec:

    spec:
      template:
        metadata:
          labels:
            admission.datadoghq.com/enabled: "false"
    
You can disable Code Security while keeping APM up by adding the DD_IAST_ENABLED=false environment variable to your deployments.

Removing APM for all services on the infrastructure

To stop producing traces, remove library injectors and restart the infrastructure:

  1. Run:
    dd-host-install --uninstall
    
  2. Restart your host.
  1. Uninstall local library injection:
    dd-container-install --uninstall
    
  2. Restart Docker:
    systemctl restart docker
    
    Or use the equivalent for your environment.
  1. Under apm:, remove instrumentation: and all following configuration in datadog-values.yaml.

  2. Under asm:, remove iast: and all following configuration indatadog-values.yaml.

  3. Run the following command:

    helm upgrade datadog-agent -f datadog-values.yaml datadog/datadog
    

Using Datadog Tracing Libraries

Select your application language for details on how to enable Code Security for your language and infrastructure types.

Java
.Net
Node.js
Python

Further reading