Datadog is a powerful monitoring and security platform that gives you visibility into end-to-end traces, application metrics, logs, and infrastructure

Datadog on Kubernetes: Avoiding Common Pitfalls

submited by

Style Pass

2021-07-17 00:30:07

Datadog is a powerful monitoring and security platform that gives you visibility into end-to-end traces, application metrics, logs, and infrastructure. While Datadog has great documentation on their Kubernetes integration, we've observed that there's some missed nuance that leads to common pitfalls.

This blog post will guide you through how to install the Datadog agent on Kubernetes and enable additional features such as DogStatsD and APM via Helm and Porter while avoiding these common pitfalls:

We will use Helm to install the Datadog agent with the default set of values. The default values in Datadog's helm chart, along with Datadog's Autodiscovery feature, is sufficient to give visibility into all cluster level metrics.

These are the commands to install the Datadog agent in your cluster using Helm v3 with the default values. Make sure to copy your API key from Datadog dashboard in the install command.

The Datadog agent is installed as a Daemonset. This means that the agent is designed to run on every node of your Kubernetes cluster. By default, the Datadog agent will assume that none of your nodes has a taint. If you've added taints to some of your nodes, the agent will run and ingest data only on the nodes that do not have taints.