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Datadog

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Learning Objective :

This Ansible training aims to equip participants with the skills needed to automate monitoring and alert management for Docker and Kubernetes instances, as well as for application traces. You will learn how to deploy monitoring tools and configure alerts adapted to their environments.

This training is mainly aimed at DevOps engineers, system administrators and developers wishing to improve their expertise in monitoring and infrastructure management.

Skills Acquired :

At the end of this training, you will be able to:

• Deploy and configure the Datadog agent in various environments: Allows you to centralize monitoring of application performance and health across different infrastructures, providing a consistent overview. The Datadog agent collects metrics and logs in real time, making it easier to diagnose problems and optimize performance across multiple environments (Docker, Kubernetes, virtual machines), allowing you to monitor modern and traditional applications in a consistent way.

• Manage application traces: Learn how to deploy and configure the Datadog module to collect application traces.

• Configure alerts: Set up alerts based on the collected metrics, using tools like Alertmanager to manage notifications.

Prerequisites :

Participants should have basic knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, system administration, and networking

I - Monitoring

a - Monitoring in Devops

Software applications are transforming the way organizations interact with customers and manage their business. Companies across all sectors are reshaping their operations towards cloud infrastructures to enable this digital transformation.

Monitoring software is the foundation of an organization's IT stack. Without monitoring, organizations are blind to the factors that impact the performance, reliability, scalability and availability of the systems in which they have invested large amounts of resources. Once installed, monitoring becomes an integral part of an organization's performance and deeply is integrated into business and operational workflows.

Historically, engineering teams have been siloed, making it difficult to develop next-generation applications in dynamic cloud environments. Legacy commercial and local technologies have been designed to work with monolithic, static, on-premises environments.

So it's time to move on.

Datadog was launched to break this model and facilitate collaboration between development and operations teams, enabling the adoption of DevOps practices.

b - What is Datadog

b.1 - Presentation

Datadog is a tool that allows us to monitor cloud infrastructure, Windows and Linux hosts, system processes, serverless functions and cloud-based applications. It can be used to visualize data, explore metrics, manage logs and perform a variety of other tasks.

Datadog is a monitoring and analysis tool for information technology (IT) and DevOps teams that can be used to determine performance metrics as well as event monitoring for infrastructure and cloud services. The software can monitor services such as servers, databases and tools.

Datadog monitoring software is available for on-premise deployment or as software as a service (SaaS). Datadog supports Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems. Support for cloud service providers includes AWS, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenShift and Google Cloud Platform.

Datadog uses an agent based on the Go language, and its backend consists of Apache Cassandra, PostgreSQL and Kafka. An application program interface API Rest is used to enable Datadog to integrate with numerous services, tools and programming languages. Integrations such as Kubernetes, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Ubuntu and Bitbucket.

The user interface includes customizable dashboards that can display graphs composed of multiple data sources in real time. Datadog can also send users notifications of performance problems on any defined metric, such as computation rates. Users are alerted by means such as email, Slack, teams, etc ..

Datadog, founded in 2010, is an observability service for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools and services via a SaaS-based data analytics platform.

The Datadog business model is based on a software as a service (SaaS) platform that integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring and log management to provide unified, real-time observability of Datadog customers' entire technology stack. Organizations use Datadog for several reasons:

• enable digital transformation and cloud migration,
• foster collaboration between development, operations and sales teams,
• accelerate time-to-market for applications,
• reduce problem resolution time,
• understand user behavior, and
• monitor key business indicators.

b.2 - Product history

The aim of Datadog is to create a real-time data integration platform to transform chaos from disparate sources into digestible, actionable information.

• In 2012, Datadog launched its first use case with infrastructure monitoring, specifically designed to manage increasingly ephemeral cloud-native architectures. This enabled Datadog to be deployed across Datadog customers' cloud computing environments and gave Datadog's product widespread use.

• In 2017, Datadog launched its APM product, designed to be widely deployed in highly distributed microservices architectures.

• In 2018, Datadog pioneered the combination of the "three pillars of observability" with the introduction of Datadog's log management product.

• To enable full stack observability, in 2019 Datadog launched user experience monitoring and announced network performance monitoring.

• In 2023, Datadog offers end-to-end monitoring and analytics powered by an extensible common data model for potential new use cases.

c - How Datadog works

Datadog is an integrated platform that aims to give you a comprehensive, real-time view of the performance of your IT infrastructures and software applications. This centralized approach aims to facilitate not only the rapid detection and resolution of problems, but also to aid in making relevant and sound business decisions.

One of the major strengths of this platform is its modularity. Datadog comes in various modules encompassing infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, user experience monitoring and network monitoring. All of this is enhanced by shared functionalities, including sophisticated dashboards, advanced analysis tools, as well as collaboration tools and handy alert options to keep you always informed.

This is what makes it so special.

What particularly sets Datadog apart is its flexibility: each product on offer can operate independently, allowing customers to choose and use the features that best suit their needs, incrementally. But the magic really happens when they're used together. Automatic synchronization kicks in, offering a cross-correlation that sheds new light on your infrastructure and applications, helping you to identify and solve problems with tenfold efficiency.

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Listed below are the Datadog sites, along with their URLs and locations:

SITE	SITEURL	SITE PARAMETER	EMPLACEMENT
US1	https://app.datadoghq.com	datadoghq.com	US
US3	https://us3.datadoghq.com	us3.datadoghq.com	US
US5	https://us5.datadoghq.com	us5.datadoghq.com	US
EU1	https://app.datadoghq.eu	datadoghq.eu	European Union
US1-FED	https://app.ddog-gov.com	ddog-gov.com	US
AP1	https://ap1.datadoghq.com	ap1.datadoghq.com	Japan

The Datadog platform is supported by hundreds of integrations to seamlessly aggregate metrics and events across all the systems and services that power digital businesses. Datadog's easy-to-use platform is deployed via a self-service installation process. Users can leverage Datadog's platform in minutes without specialized training, cumbersome implementation or customization.

d - Datadog benefits

Datadog is a monitoring tool that enables in-depth analysis of the infrastructure of any service. It is highly flexible and compatible with most major software development tools and platforms. [In addition to its out-of-the-box functionality, Datadog is designed to aggregate data from other applications, this offers several advantages:

• Accelerate digital transformation: Datadog enables customers to develop and maintain mission-critical applications with agility and confidence in the cloud.

• Reduce time to problem detection : Datadog's unified platform allows customers to quickly isolate the root cause of application problems.

• Improve problem resolution time : It platform provides the data and insights needed to quickly resolve application problems.

• Improve the agility of development, operations, security and business teams: Datadog eliminates the historical silos of development and operations teams and provides a platform that enables efficient, agile development through the adoption of DevOps and DevSecOps.

• Reduce operational costs: Datadog eliminates the need for burdensome implementation costs and professional services by providing several integrations with key technologies which customers can derive significant value, avoiding the in-house development costs and professional services required to create these integrations.

e - Datadog products

The Datadog platform consists of products that can be used individually or as a unified solution. It includes a marketplace where customers can access products created by Datadog partners on top of the Datadog platform. Datadog products include:

• Infrastructure monitoring: Datadog's infrastructure monitoring platform provides real-time monitoring of IT infrastructure in public cloud, private cloud and hybrid environments, as well as in containers and serverless architectures, ensuring application performance and availability.

• Application Performance Monitoring (APM): APM provides visibility into application health and performance regardless of the deployment environment. Distributed tracing across microservices, hosts, containers and serverless computing functions enables Datadog customers to gain in-depth insights into application performance.

• Log management: log management for applications, systems and cloud platforms ingests data, creates indexes and allows logs to be queried with visualizations and alerts to provide immediate insight into any performance issues.

• User Experience Monitoring: User Experience Monitoring monitors the customer's digital experience and comprises two products - Synthetics and Real User Monitoring, or RUM. Synthetics provides user experience monitoring of applications and API endpoints via AI-powered simulated user requests to track application performance and ensure availability. RUM analyzes and visualizes front-end application performance as experienced by all users.

• Continuous Profiler: Continuous Profiler measures code-level performance in any environment with an always-on, low-overhead solution. This enables customers to identify and optimize the most resource-intensive parts of application code to improve mean time to resolution, enhance the user experience and reduce cloud provider costs.

• Database Monitoring: Database Monitoring enables customers to view query metrics and explain their database plans in one place. With Database Monitoring, they can quickly identify costly and slow queries and explore precise execution details to resolve bottlenecks.

• Network Monitoring: network monitoring enables analysis and visualization of network traffic flow in cloud or hybrid environments, allowing customers to monitor network traffic flow without sacrificing performance.

• Cloud SIEM: Cloud SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) enables customers to detect threats in real time and investigate security signals through metrics, traces, logs and other data.

• Cloud security posture management: cloud security posture management enables customers to assess and visualize the current and historical security posture of their cloud environments, automate the collection of audit evidence and detect configuration errors that leave their organization vulnerable to attack.

• Cloud Workload Security: Cloud Workload Security performs in-depth, internal analysis of workload activity on customer hosts and containers to uncover threats.

• Incident management: incident management enables users to report incidents, investigate root causes and dependencies, collaborate around a shared view of the incident, track resolution and automatically generate post-mortem documentation, all within the Datadog platform.

• CI visibility: CI, or continuous integration, visibility provides in-depth insight into the health and performance of customers' CI environment. Datadog auto-instruments pipelines and tests so customers can dive into traces for problematic builds and executions.

f - Main Datadog use cases?

Datadog enables us to collect metrics and gather detailed real-time information on our IT infrastructure. Here are the application's main use cases:

• IT professionals can create, modify and manage alerts and notifications concerning their IT infrastructure.

• Organizations can use Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to reduce latency and eliminate errors

• They can test production environments and performance.

• They can configure multiple integrations that collect metrics, traces and logs to send data to the platform.

• They can use it as a security platform to detect threats and application configuration errors in their infrastructure.

• If we use Jenkins, which is an automation server for software deployment, the application can help us visualize Jenkins job metrics and pipeline execution.

g - Datadog pricing

Before you start using Datadog, it's essential to understand the three different pricing plans made available by the company:

• The free plan gives up to one day of metrics retention, and we can store events and metrics on up to 5 hosts without paying.

• The Plan Pro provides over 500 integrations, ready-to-use dashboards with enhanced functionality and 15 months of metrics retention for $15 per host/month.

• In the Enterprise plan, we'll get premium technical support via chat, e-mail and phone. we'll also get 15 months of metrics retention and unlimited alerts, but the plan costs $23 per host/month.

The app also offers free 14-day trials for its Pro and Enterprise plans, no credit card required.