This page gives you a quick, practical overview of Datadog—an observability platform that unifies metrics, traces, logs, and security signals.
You’ll learn when to use it, which features matter most, and how to get value fast.
In short, you install a lightweight agent, connect integrations, and begin visualizing telemetry in minutes.
Moreover, built-in APM, RUM, and Synthetic tests help teams catch regressions before users do.
Because these pillars live in one place, you correlate issues faster and reduce meantime to resolution.
One platform for telemetry and security: connect services, visualize health, and alert on risk.
If you’re launching monitoring quickly, start small: add the agent, enable a few key integrations, and build a
single team dashboard. For an end-to-end walkthrough, see our guide on setting up monitors and dashboards.
In addition, the official docs cover advanced features like Watchdog, service maps, and CI visibility.
Dashboards bring together application performance, infrastructure health, and user experience.
Scroll to the flashcards for a rapid refresher. Then, use the links at the end to practice with real configs.
🐶 Datadog Flashcards
🔍 What is it?
A monitoring and security platform that unifies metrics, traces, logs, and more.
📦 What does it monitor?
Infrastructure, apps, containers, clouds, APIs, and user experience.
⚙️ What is the Agent?
A lightweight collector that ships metrics, logs, and traces from hosts and containers.
📈 What is the Infrastructure tab?
A real-time map of hosts, containers, and cloud instances for quick triage.
🧪 What is APM?
Tracing that shows request paths, service latency, and bottlenecks across dependencies.
🧠 What is Watchdog?
An AI engine that flags anomalies and outliers across telemetry automatically.
🗂️ What are Dashboards?
Custom boards that visualize metrics, logs, and traces with rich widgets and heatmaps.
📊 What is Log Management?
Ingest, process, and analyze distributed logs in real time with search and pipelines.
📡 What is Synthetic Monitoring?
Automated tests that check site and API uptime, response time, and flows.
🔐 What is RUM?
Real User Monitoring that captures frontend errors and session performance.
🔧 Can it send alerts?
Yes—monitors trigger notifications on thresholds, anomalies, and composite rules.
🤝 What integrates with it?
Hundreds of services: AWS, Azure, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, and more.
To begin, instrument one service, create a few monitors, and wire alerts to Slack or PagerDuty.
Next, add RUM and Synthetics so you see both backend and user experience. Finally, enable Watchdog
to surface hidden anomalies without manual rules.
