Monitor APISIX Metrics with Datadog

As the complexity of IT infrastructures and systems increases, continuous monitoring has become a vital part of any IT operation to improve system reliability and avoid costly downtimes.

Datadog is a cloud monitoring platform that offers a unified solution for metrics, logs, and tracing. The platform provides many pre-defined dashboard templates and allows for flexible customization to meet complex data analytics and visualization needs.

This guide will walk you through the process of integrating Datadog with APISIX using a containerized Datadog agent. You will be able to monitor APISIX metrics in Datadog and use them to create additional monitoring, alerting, and analytics.

Prerequisite(s)

• Install Docker.
• Install cURL to send requests to the services for validation.
• Follow the Getting Started tutorial to start a new APISIX instance in Docker.
• Create a Datadog account and note down the site and API key.

Start Datadog Agent

The Datadog agent collects events and metrics from monitored objects and sends them to Datadog, where you can further analyze your monitoring and performance data.

Start the Datadog agent in Docker:

docker run -d \
  --name dogstatsd-agent \
  -e DD_API_KEY=35ebe12345678dec56218930b79fdb4cf \
  -e DD_SITE="us5.datadoghq.com" \
  -e DD_HOSTNAME=apisix.quickstart \
  -e DD_DOGSTATSD_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC=true \
  -p 8125:8125/udp \
  datadog/dogstatsd:latest

❶ DD_API_KEY: replace with your API key.

❷ DD_SITE: replace with your Datadog site.

❸ DD_HOSTNAME: replace with your hostname.

❹ DD_DOGSTATSD_NON_LOCAL_TRAFFIC: set to true to listen to DogStatsD packets from other containers.

You can configure most options in the agent’s main configuration file datadog.yaml through environment variables, prefixed with DD_. For more information, see agent environment variables.

Connect Datadog Agent to APISIX

By default, the datadog plugin expects the Datadog agent to be available at 127.0.0.1:8125. To update the IP address and other metadata, configure the plugin metadata of datadog plugin as such:

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/plugin_metadata/datadog" -X PUT -d '
{
  "host": "192.168.0.90",
  "port": 8125,
  "namespace": "apisix"
}'

❶ host: replace with your IP address.

❷ port: replace with your port, if not using the default 8125.

❸ namespace: customize the namespace that prefixes all metrics.

Monitor Route Metrics

You can either enable the datadog plugin globally, which collect metrics from all routes; or on a specific route:

Global

Configure datadog to be a global plugin:

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/global_rules/datadog" -X PUT -d '
{
  "plugins": {
    "datadog": {}
  }
}'

Create a sample route, which you will be collecting some metrics on:

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/routes" -X PUT -d '
{
  "id": "dd-route",
  "uri": "/anything",
  "upstream": {
    "type": "roundrobin",
    "nodes": {
      "httpbin.org": 1
    }
  }
}'

Route

Create a route and enable datadog plugin:

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9180/apisix/admin/routes" -X PUT -d '
{
  "id": "dd-route",
  "uri": "/anything",
  "plugins": {
    "datadog": {}
  },
  "upstream": {
    "type": "roundrobin",
    "nodes": {
      "httpbin.org": 1
    }
  }
}'

In Datadog, select Metrics from the left menu and go to Explorer. You should see a number of APISIX metrics available:

Generate a few requests to the route:

curl "http://127.0.0.1:9080/anything"

You should receive HTTP/1.1 200 OK responses.

Navigate back to Datadog metric explorer and select apisix.ingress.size.count as the metric. You should see the count reflecting the number of requests generated:

Next Steps

You have now integrated Datadog with APISIX for metrics monitoring. With these metrics, you can now create alerts and dashboards according to your system reliability requirements. For more information, see Datadog documentation.