APM

Overview

Datadog Application Performance Monitoring (APM) provides deep visibility into your applications, enabling you to identify performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot issues, and optimize your services. With distributed tracing, out-of-the-box dashboards, and seamless correlation with other telemetry data, Datadog APM helps ensure the best possible performance and user experience for your applications.

For an introduction to terminology used in Datadog APM, see APM Terms and Concepts.

Getting started

The simplest way to start with Datadog APM is with Single Step Instrumentation. This approach installs the Datadog Agent and instruments your application in one step, with no additional configuration steps required. To learn more, read Single Step Instrumentation.

For setups that require more customization, Datadog supports custom instrumentation with Datadog tracing libraries. To learn more, read Application Instrumentation.

Use cases

Discover some ways Datadog APM can help support your use cases:

You want to…	How Datadog APM can help
Understand how requests flow through your system.	Use the Trace Explorer to query and visualize end-to-end traces across distributed services.
Monitor service health and performance of individual services.	Use the service and resource pages to assess service health by analyzing performance metrics, tracking deployments, and identifying problematic resources.
Correlate traces with DBM, RUM, logs, synthetics, and profiles.	Correlate APM Data with Other Telemetry to give context to your data for more comprehensive analysis.
Control how data flows into Datadog.	Use Ingestion Controls to adjust ingestion configuration and sampling rates by service and resource. Use Retention filters to choose which spans to retain for 15 days.

Trace Explorer

The Trace Explorer allows you search and analyze your traces in real-time. Identify performance bottlenecks, troubleshoot errors, and pivot to related logs and metrics to understand the full context around any issue.

Service page

The service page helps you monitor service performance and compare between versions during deployments.

Correlating traces with other telemetry

Datadog APM integrates seamlessly with logs, real user monitoring (RUM), synthetic monitoring, and more:

View your application logs side-by-side with traces to find logs for specific requests, services, or versions.
Associate RUM sessions with backend traces to understand how backend performance affects user experience.
Associate synthetic tests with traces to troubleshoot failures across frontend and backend requests.

Ingestion controls and retention filters

Traces start in your instrumented applications and flow into Datadog.

Datadog APM provides tools to manage the volume and retention of your trace data. Use Ingestion Controls to adjust sampling rates and retention filters to control which spans are are stored.

APM