Single Step APM Instrumentation
Overview
Single Step Instrumentation (SSI) automatically installs the Datadog SDKs with no additional configuration required, reducing onboarding time from days to minutes.
To learn more about how it works, see the injector guide for Single Step Instrumentation.
Instrument SDKs across applications
When you install or update the Datadog Agent with APM Instrumentation enabled, the Agent instruments your applications by loading the Datadog SDK into supported processes. This enables distributed tracing by capturing and sending trace data from your services without requiring code changes.
After instrumentation, you can optionally:
Follow the relevant documentation to learn more about Single Step Instrumentation for your deployment type:
Unified Service Tags (USTs) connect traces, metrics, and logs by applying consistent tags across your telemetry. This makes it easier to navigate your observability data.
Learn how to set USTs for:
Enable SDK-dependent products and features
Once SSI loads the Datadog SDK into your applications and enables distributed tracing, you can configure additional products that rely on the SDK. These include capabilities such as Continuous Profiler, Application Security Monitoring, and trace ingestion controls.
The available setup methods depend on your platform:
| Configuration method | Description | Supported platforms |
|---|
Configure in application_monitoring.yaml | Enable products across all services on a host without modifying application command lines. | Linux only |
| Set environment variables | Enable products by setting environment variables directly in your application configuration. | Linux, Kubernetes, Windows, Docker |
| Configuration method | Description | Supported platforms |
|---|
| Set environment variables | Enable products by setting environment variables directly in your application configuration. | Linux, Kubernetes, Windows, Docker |
| Configuration method | Description | Supported platforms |
|---|
| Configure with workload targeting | By default, Single Step Instrumentation instruments all services in all namespaces. Use workload targeting to limit instrumentation to specific namespaces, pods, or workloads, and apply custom configurations. | Kubernetes only |
| Set environment variables | Enable products by setting environment variables directly in your application configuration. | Linux, Kubernetes, Windows, Docker |
Troubleshooting
Single Step Instrumentation automatically disables when it detects custom instrumentation in your application. If you want to use SSI, you’ll need to:
- Remove any existing custom instrumentation code.
- Restart your application.
Further reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
