Datadog considerations

Read this topic to understand how to correctly configure your data mappings for a Datadog integration with Service Observability.

Service discovery

Services are matched to APM data using the key/value pairs on the APM metadata. For Datadog, the Software Catalog list entities API is used. However, that API only returns data for services that include metadata. If you want to map services that don't include metadata, you must create a mapping using service as the tag and the name of the service as the value.

For example, say you have a service named internet-banking-4 that you want to use in a mapping and it doesn't contain metadata. You set up the mapping as shown in this screen shot.

Figure 1. Datadog mapping when no metadata is present

Host discovery

Service Observability uses the Datadog Hosts list hosts API to return host data related to the services.

Database discovery

These specific metrics are used in the queries to map database entities to services:

• PostgreSQL: postgresql.connections
• MySQL: mysql.net.max_connections

If your databases don't emit these metrics, they will not be mapped.

Default dashboard templates

The Requests, Errors, and Latency charts on the Overview and Observability dashboard templates are created using the Datadog trace.http.request trace metric. If a service is not emitting that metric, no data will be found. You can customize the template to use a different trace metric query. See Customize Service Observability dashboard templates for more information.