Monitoring & Observability
Datadog with AWS
Deep visibility into AWS infrastructure and applications with Datadog — unified monitoring platform.
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Summary
Monitor AWS infrastructure with Datadog: metrics, logs, traces, and APM from a single platform.
Key Facts
- • Monitor AWS infrastructure with Datadog: metrics, logs, traces, and APM from a single platform
- • Deep visibility into AWS infrastructure and applications with Datadog — unified monitoring platform
- • How does Datadog integrate with AWS
- • Install Datadog Agent on EC2 instances or use serverless monitoring for Lambda
- • Enable Datadog integration via AWS IAM role to pull CloudWatch metrics
Entity Definitions
- Lambda
- Lambda is relevant to datadog with aws.
- EC2
- EC2 is relevant to datadog with aws.
- S3
- S3 is relevant to datadog with aws.
- RDS
- RDS is relevant to datadog with aws.
- DynamoDB
- DynamoDB is relevant to datadog with aws.
- CloudWatch
- CloudWatch is relevant to datadog with aws.
- IAM
- IAM is relevant to datadog with aws.
- EKS
- EKS is relevant to datadog with aws.
- ECS
- ECS is relevant to datadog with aws.
- serverless
- serverless is relevant to datadog with aws.
- microservices
- microservices is relevant to datadog with aws.
- DevOps
- DevOps is relevant to datadog with aws.
- cost optimization
- cost optimization is relevant to datadog with aws.
Datadog + AWS Overview
Datadog is an enterprise monitoring platform that ingests metrics, logs, and traces from AWS infrastructure and applications. It provides dashboards, alerting, and analytics across the full stack.
Why Datadog for AWS Monitoring?
Single Pane of Glass
- One dashboard for EC2, RDS, Lambda, DynamoDB, S3 metrics
- See infrastructure and application performance together
- Correlate problems across services
Advanced Analytics
- Forecasting: predict when you’ll run out of capacity
- Anomaly detection: automatically find unusual behavior
- Outlier detection: identify problematic instances in a fleet
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
- Trace requests through distributed services
- Find slow database queries, external API calls
- Debug production issues faster
Cost Monitoring
- Track AWS spend over time
- Identify cost anomalies
- Understand which services are expensive
How Datadog Monitors AWS
Agent-Based (EC2 instances)
- Install Datadog Agent on EC2
- Agent collects system metrics (CPU, memory, disk)
- Sends to Datadog for visualization
Serverless (Lambda functions)
- Datadog Lambda extension monitors function performance
- Automatically traces cold starts, duration, errors
API-Based (CloudWatch integration)
- Datadog reads CloudWatch metrics via AWS API
- No agent needed for managed services (RDS, DynamoDB, S3)
Log Collection
- Agent forwards application logs to Datadog
- CloudWatch Logs integration pulls AWS service logs
Key Datadog + AWS Features
Infrastructure Monitoring
- Real-time metrics from EC2, RDS, ECS, EKS
- Automatic resource discovery
- Health status and alerts
Application Performance Monitoring
- Distributed tracing across microservices
- Database query profiling
- Endpoint latency analysis
Log Management
- Centralized log ingestion
- Log search and filtering
- Log analytics and alerting
Alerting & Notifications
- Multi-condition alerts
- Escalation policies
- Integration with Slack, PagerDuty, email
Datadog Pricing for AWS
Infrastructure Monitoring
- ~$10-15 per host per month
- For 50 EC2 instances: ~$500-750/month
Log Ingestion
- ~$0.70 per GB (varies by plan)
- For 100 GB logs/month: ~$70/month
APM
- $5 per million spans
- For high-traffic apps: significant cost
Total: Small startups $200-500/month, enterprises $5,000+/month
Datadog vs CloudWatch vs Open-Source
Datadog
- Most powerful, expensive
- Best for enterprises
- Full-featured observability
CloudWatch
- Free with AWS
- Basic but sufficient
- Native integration
- Limited analytics
Open-Source (Prometheus, Grafana)
- Free, self-hosted
- Requires operational overhead
- Good for teams with DevOps expertise
Best Practices
Tagging
- Tag all resources consistently (environment, service, cost-center)
- Use tags for dashboards and alerting
Alerts
- Alert on business metrics (errors, latency) not infrastructure
- Avoid alert fatigue with intelligent thresholds
Dashboards
- Create service-specific dashboards
- Share dashboards across teams
- Keep dashboards updated as infrastructure changes
Related Services
Frequently Asked Questions
How does Datadog integrate with AWS?
Install Datadog Agent on EC2 instances or use serverless monitoring for Lambda. Enable Datadog integration via AWS IAM role to pull CloudWatch metrics. Datadog automatically discovers and monitors AWS resources.
What AWS metrics does Datadog collect?
EC2 CPU, memory, disk; RDS performance metrics; S3 bucket sizes; Lambda duration and errors; ELB latency; DynamoDB throughput. Datadog also collects custom metrics from applications via StatsD or API.
Can Datadog replace CloudWatch?
Datadog is more powerful than CloudWatch: better dashboards, advanced analytics, cross-service correlation. But CloudWatch is free/included with AWS. Many orgs use both: CloudWatch for free AWS native monitoring, Datadog for app-level observability.
How do I correlate logs and metrics in Datadog?
Tag logs and metrics consistently (environment, service, version). Use Datadog APM for distributed tracing across services. Correlate events with metrics: when error spikes, see what changed in infrastructure.
What is the cost of Datadog on AWS?
Datadog charges per monitored host (~$10-15/host/month) plus additional fees for logs, APM, and custom metrics. For large organizations monitoring 100+ hosts, total cost can be significant. Compare with free AWS monitoring.
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