Overview
Datadog Service Catalog is a centralized place to access important information about all services in your organization. Achieve end-to-end service ownership at scale, get real-time performance insights, detect and address reliability and security risks, and manage application dependencies all in one place. Access team communications tools such as Slack, source control such as GitHub, Datadog dashboards, and Datadog views that receive and monitor telemetry data for each service.
The Service Catalog includes services that do not actively emit trace metrics, and you do not need to instrument your service for it to appear. Service Catalog also automatically includes services detected by USM and RUM. Service Catalog supports a one hour look-back window. If you do not see your APM services in Service Catalog, they most likely were not sending active trace metrics during the last hour.
The Service Catalog is useful for:
- Training new developers and site reliability engineers by providing a clear view of all services, their structures, and links to more information.
- Improving the on-call experience for everyone by establishing correct ownership information and communication channels, alongside easy access to monitoring and troubleshooting details.
- Embedding links to solutions and troubleshooting tools such as runbooks and documentation directly in the observability tooling engineers are already using.
- Speeding incident recovery by increasing confidence and simplifying locating owners of upstream and downstream services and dependencies.
- Detecting which services aren’t reporting observability data or having that data monitored.
- Facilitating the practice of good tagging to optimize cross-telemetry insights.
- Providing engineering leadership with a high-level view of reliability practices across teams and services.
- Spotting issues like missing SLOs, monitors, or services without ownership.
- Proactively identifying services exposed to application attacks.
- Reducing application risks by finding and fixing known security vulnerabilities in the dependencies of your services.
- Visualizing how changes to infrastructure can affect costs over time.
- Understanding trends and identifying inefficiencies in the costs related to your services.
Getting started
Explore what Service Catalog has to offer:
Role based access and permissions
For general information, see Role Based Access Control and Role Permissions.
Read permission
The Service Catalog read permission allows a user to read service catalog data, which enables the following features:
- Service Catalog list
- Discover UI
- Service Definition endpoint:
/api/v2/services/definition/<service_name>
The permission is enabled by default in the Datadog Read Only Role and Datadog Standard Role.
Write permission
The Service Catalog write permission allows a user to modify service catalog data. The write permission is required for the following features:
- Inserting or Updating a Service Definition with the
POST /api/v2/services/definitions endpoint - Deleting a Service Definition with the
DELETE /api/v2/services/definition/<service_name> endpoint - Completing the onboarding process in the Discover Services UI
- Updating service metadata in the UI
The permission is enabled by default in the Datadog Admin Role and Datadog Standard Role.
Services types
Every monitored service is associated with a type. Datadog automatically determines this type based on the span.type attribute attached to incoming spans data. The type specifies the name of the application or framework that the Datadog Agent is integrating with.
For example, if you use the official Flask Integration, the Type is set to “Web”. If you are monitoring a custom application, the Type appears as “Custom”.
The type of the service can be one of:
- Cache
- Custom
- DB
- Serverless function
- Web
Some integrations alias to types. For example, Postgres, MySQL, and Cassandra map to the type “DB”. Redis and Memcache integrations map to the type “Cache”.
Updating service type and language
With Service Catalog metadata schema 2.2, you can specify the type and language for user-defined services or overwrite the auto-detected type and language for instrumented services. Correctly label the service type and language to help other teams further understand what your services do and how to interact with them.
Changing service color
Service color is used in trace visualizations. Click the service type icon to change it.
Data retention
The services and resources statistics, and span summaries on the Service List and Service Page are retained for up to 30 days. For customized queries on APM trace metrics, use Metric Explorer. Learn more about data retention for APM.
Further reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
