Datadog agent

Datadog agent has many components. First, a datadog agent should run in the host. Then a datadog client send data to this agent in the code.

• datadog: datadog agent client. It deals with connection options
• ddtrace: datadog APM. Send traffic specific to logging, traces, services.

Datadog setup

You can check the datadog configuration in the pod directly preintenv | grep DD_. These variables are injected to datadog agent during startup. For example, below code will use env variable DD_CONTAINER_INCLUDE_LOGS for this option.

config.BindEnvAndSetDefault("container_include_logs", []string{})

It has a step to add a envPrefix DD_ to all options.

A few main configurations below.

• DD_ENV
• DD_SERVICE defines the service name in the APM services page.
• DD_VERSION

Agent

Below are the processes running in a datadog container.

root@datadog-27q4r:/# ps -efww
UID        PID  PPID  C STIME TTY          TIME CMD
root         1     0  3 Jan09 ?        00:15:04 agent run
root      3371     0  0 02:31 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
root      3485  3371  0 02:31 pts/0    00:00:00 ps -efww

The command-line program agent run is a cobra program and run is a subcommand!. The entry point is here. As you can imagine, this run subcommand does a lot of things. Let’s dive into each sub component one by one.

Log agent

Datadog is installed as a DaemonSet in Kubernetes and if enabled, it automatically tails container logs and sends them to datadog.com. So how does this process work?

The log-agent is started here. It is controlled by a config logs_enabled.

Log-agent consists of a set of launchers. Each launcher is responsible for a certain category of logs. We are interested in docker file logs. From there, you can see how file trailers are set up. The basic flow is as follows,

Trailer calls decoder to decode file content line by line.
  -> decoder calls parser to pare line.

The format for docker logs is below.

type logLine struct {
	Log    string
	Stream string
	Time   string
}

Here, stream is either stderr or stdout, and datadog uses this field to determine if the log level is an error or info, so you application’s log stream channel matters!

Configuration

Template Variables

Datadog agent can use template variables in its configuration file. These configurations will be resolved dynamically. This is a new feature introduced in v6.1. See the list of common template variables here.

[I am using ! to stand for %. My stupid blog template system does not allow %%. v_v]

The most used template variable is environment variable !!env_{...}!!. The implementation is here and here. So it is a simple regex match. This also means that you cannot nest template variables like !!env_{!!env_{..}!!}!!. Why I mention this? Because Java programmers are so fascinated with nested template variables. Pick some Spring code, you will find a lot. Good for them.