Setup the DataDog project

Then, sign up for Datadog (use “Datadog Recruiting Candidate” in the “Company” field), get the Agent reporting metrics from your local machine. The rest of the exercises will work best on a Linux host either via Vagrant/Virtualbox or a bare metal VM, but not Docker Desktop for Mac.

Configure the DataDog agent

The agent will read configuration info from two sources:

  • The datadog.yaml file for general agent-specific details. It looks like

hostname: gearbox09.dev.controlplane.info
tags:
  - environment: dev
  - admin_email: jitkelme@gmail.com
  - os: ubuntu-bionic
  - host: gearbox09
env: dev
log_level: 'info'

and then it will scan the contents of the conf.d folder, looking for conf.yaml files. For example, this is a config file for MySQL:

init_config:

instances:
- server: 127.0.0.1
user: datadog
pass: <redacted>
port: "3306"
options:
replication: false
galera_cluster: true
extra_status_metrics: true
extra_innodb_metrics: true
extra_performance_metrics: true
schema_size_metrics: false
disable_innodb_metrics: false

There are examples for most integrations in the ~/.datadog-agent/etc/conf.d/ directory.