Send or visualize Datadog Metrics
Caution
Datadog proxy, the Grafana Cloud service used to ingest and query Datadog metrics, is deprecated as of June 6, 2024.
The service remains available for anyone who has accessed the proxy between June 6, 2023 and June 6, 2024.
For other users, this service has limited availability and access to the service might be removed at any point. For an alternative, refer to the blog post on translating Datadog metrics into OTLP with the OpenTelemetry Collector and Grafana Alloy.
For any questions, contact Support.
You can forward metrics with Grafana Labs Datadog Metrics directly from your Datadog Agents. To view a list of supported features, refer to Datadog metrics supported features.
The following configuration refers to <dd-cluster>.grafana.net
in several places. The value of <dd-cluster>
depends on your specific Grafana Cloud stack. To find out the value for your Grafana Cloud stack, go to the Prometheus metrics details in the desired stack, take the domain from the URL and replace prometheus-
with dd-
.
For example, if your Prometheus URL is https://prometheus-us-central1.grafana.net/api/prom
, your Hosted Datadog Metrics API can be found on https://dd-us-central1.grafana.net/datadog
.
Forwarding metrics
You can forward Datadog metrics to Grafana Cloud from either the Datadog Agent or Datadog’s observability pipeline, Vector.
Start by obtaining a Grafana Cloud Access Policy token with the metrics:write
scope as well as your Grafana Cloud Prometheus username / instance ID. Next, follow the instructions specific to the Datadog Agent or Vector.
Forward metrics using the Datadog Agent
If you want to forward metrics to Grafana Cloud using the Datadog Agent, follow the instructions that match your desired use case:
Forward metrics to both Datadog and Grafana Cloud
You can set up your Datadog Agent to forward Datadog metrics simultaenously to Grafana Cloud and Datadog. We recommend this approach for current Datadog users who want to evaluate Grafana Cloud.
The instructions below ensure that the Datadog Agent handles metrics pushes to Grafana Cloud and Datadog in separate, isolated queues. This means that problems pushing to one will not affect the other.
The following use cases require different configurations:
The Datadog Agent runs as a service or on any scheduler that can use secrets, such as Kubernetes.
Export your credentials as the environment variables
GRAFANA_CLOUD_USERNAME
andGRAFANA_CLOUD_TOKEN
.
After exporting your credentials, export theDD_ADDITIONAL_ENDPOINTS
environment variable:DD_ADDITIONAL_ENDPOINTS='{"https://$(GRAFANA_CLOUD_USERNAME):$(GRAFANA_CLOUD_TOKEN)@<dd-cluster>.grafana.net/datadog": ["grafana-labs"]}'
The Datadog Agent runs as a system service.
Export the environment variable in the daemon service configuration: ```bash Environment=DD_ADDITIONAL_ENDPOINTS='{"https://<username>:<token>@<dd-cluster>.grafana.net/datadog": ["grafana-labs"]}' ```
You must use
grafana-labs
as the API key value for the additional Grafana Labs endpoint. Do not use your Datadog API key.
This is similar to setting the additional_endpoints
key in datadog.yaml
, however you can’t paste your token directly into the YAML file because Datadog Agent will convert it to lowercase as part of the config parsing. Setting it through the DD_ADDITIONAL_ENDPOINTS
environment variable does not go through that lowercase conversion.
Only forward metrics to Grafana Cloud
If you want to exclusively forward Datadog metrics to Grafana Cloud (rather than forwarding them simultaneously to Grafana Cloud and Datadog), you have two configuration options.
Use your Grafana Cloud credentials in the API key configuration section
# The host of the Datadog intake server to send Agent data to dd_url: https://<dd-cluster>.grafana.net/datadog api_key: <username>:<token>
Use basic authentication
# The host of the Datadog intake server to send Agent data to dd_url: https://<username>:<token>@<dd-cluster>.grafana.net/datadog api_key: grafana-labs # Additional endpoints to forward metrics to other backends additional_endpoints: {}
You must use grafana-labs
as the value for the api_key field. Do not use your Datadog API key.
Forward metrics using Vector
To forward Datadog metrics to Grafana Cloud using Vector, you’ll need to add a new Datadog metrics sink to your Vector configuration.
Use the following sample configuration snippet below, replacing the <username>
, <token>
and <dd-cluster>
fields. You must also update the inputs field to specify the source or transform ID(s) of the Datadog metrics you wish to forward.
[sinks.my_datadog_sink_id]
inputs = [ <list_of_source_or_transform_ids> ]
type = "datadog_metrics"
endpoint = "https://<dd-cluster>.grafana.net/datadog"
default_api_key = "<username>:<token>"
request.retry_attempts = 1 # See note below
The requirement to set
request.retry_attempts
to1
is a workaround until the Grafana Cloud Datadog API supports sketch-type metrics. Today, when Vector sends a sketch metric, Grafana Cloud responds with a404
error to indicate this metric type is not supported. By setting Vector’sretry_attempts
to1
, we ensure that when this404
error is received, Vector only retries the failed request once rather than retrying infinitely.
Grafana Datadog data source configuration
Configure a new Datadog data source in your Grafana instance.
- In your Grafana instance, click Connections in the left-side menu.
- Search for
DataDog
. - Install Datadog completing the following fields:
- Name: Datadog Grafana Cloud
- Connection Mode: Hosted Datadog Metrics
- Hosted metrics URL: https://<dd-cluster>.grafana.net/datadog
- Basic Auth User: <Username>
- Basic Auth Password: <Cloud_Access_Policy_token>
- Your access policy needs to have the
metrics:read
scope.
- Your access policy needs to have the
To compare queries between your data source and the Datadog official API, create an additional data source using the same steps, but change following fields:
- Name: Datadog
- API URL: https://api.datadoghq.com
- API Key: <Datadog_API_Key>
- App Key: <Datadog_App_Key>
- Enable Basic Auth: Off
Verify that metrics are available
When all of your Datadog Agents have been configured, verify that Grafana Cloud is properly receiving metrics.
- In your Grafana instance, click Explore.
- Select Datadog Grafana Cloud from the data source dropdown menu.
- Use the panel to query any existing metric, for example
datadog.Agent.running
. - Click on Run query to validate that it returns the expected results.
Migrate Datadog dashboards to Grafana
Note
This tooling remains available after the deprecation of Datadog proxy.
Grafana has internal tooling to migrate Datadog dashboard files to Grafana for Enterprise customers. To learn more about the Grafana Cloud Enterprise stack, contact us.