Compatibility requirements

The Go Tracer requires Go 1.17+ and Datadog Agent >= 5.21.1. For a full list of Datadog’s Go version and framework support (including legacy and maintenance versions), see the Compatibility Requirements page.

Installation and getting started

Follow the Quickstart instructions within the Datadog app for the best experience, including:

  • Step-by-step instructions scoped to your deployment configuration (hosts, Docker, Kubernetes, or Amazon ECS).
  • Dynamically set service, env, and version tags.
  • Enable the Continuous Profiler, ingesting 100% of traces , and Trace ID injection into logs during setup.

Otherwise, follow the instructions below to add the Datadog Tracing Library to your code and to initiate the Go integration.

Configure the Datadog Agent for APM

Install and configure the Datadog Agent to receive traces from your now instrumented application. By default the Datadog Agent is enabled in your datadog.yaml file under apm_config with enabled: true and listens for trace traffic at localhost:8126. For containerized environments, follow the links below to enable trace collection within the Datadog Agent.

  1. Set apm_non_local_traffic: true in the apm_config section of your main datadog.yaml configuration file.

  2. See the specific setup instructions to ensure that the Agent is configured to receive traces in a containerized environment:

Docker
Kubernetes
Amazon ECS
ECS Fargate

  1. After the application is instrumented, the trace client attempts to send traces to the Unix domain socket /var/run/datadog/apm.socket by default. If the socket does not exist, traces are sent to http://localhost:8126.

    A similar rule applies to all metrics sent by the Go tracer (including Runtime Metrics and internal telemetry): the client attempts to send Dogstatsd data to the Unix domain socket /var/run/datadog/dsd.socket and defaults to http://localhost:8125 if that does not exist.

    If you require different hosts or ports, use one or more of the following environment variables. The examples show the defaults, but you can set them to other values as well.

    DD_AGENT_HOST=localhost   # The host to send traces and metrics to. Defaults to localhost.
    DD_TRACE_AGENT_PORT=8126  # The port to send traces to. Defaults to 8126.
    DD_DOGSTATSD_PORT=8125    # The port to send Dogstatsd metrics to. Defaults to 8125.
    

  1. Set DD_SITE in the Datadog Agent to to ensure the Agent sends data to the right Datadog location.

To set up Datadog APM in AWS Lambda, see the Tracing Serverless Functions documentation.

Tracing is available for a number of other environments, such as Heroku, Cloud Foundry, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

For other environments, refer to the Integrations documentation for that environment and contact support if you are encountering any setup issues.

Activate Go integrations to create spans

Datadog has a series of pluggable packages which provide out-of-the-box support for instrumenting a series of libraries and frameworks. A list of these packages can be found in the Compatibility Requirements page. Import these packages into your application and follow the configuration instructions listed alongside each Integration.

Library configuration

If needed, configure the tracing library to send application performance telemetry data as you require, including setting up Unified Service Tagging. Read Library Configuration for details.

For configuration instructions and details about using the API, see the Datadog API documentation.

Further Reading