At Grafana Labs, we have a “big tent” philosophy: We believe our users should be able to determine their own observability strategy and choose their own tools, so we help users bring different data sources together.
Datadog is a powerful product used by many teams, and we hear a lot from customers about how we should further embrace and support this critical data source — which is why we created the Datadog data source plugin a few years ago. Recently, our community and customers have asked us to provide a deeper interoperability with Datadog.
So today we are introducing a suite of new capabilities in the plugin:
- The ability to host Datadog metrics in Grafana Cloud using an easy-to-use Datadog-compliant API.
- The ability to import Datadog dashboards into Grafana Cloud.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at the new features and how to get started.
Datadog metrics, hosted in Grafana Cloud
You can now send metrics from Datadog agents directly to Grafana Cloud, removing the need to rewrite instrumentation code. You can then query metrics stored in Grafana Cloud using the Datadog-style query language.
Behind the scenes, metrics are translated into Prometheus metrics while being received and hosted in your Grafana Cloud instance. This means that you can also query metrics sent by the Datadog agents using PromQL.
All of this can be done while keeping your Datadog infrastructure the same as before, with metrics fetched by the Datadog agents and sent to both Grafana Cloud and Datadog. You can also pause sending metrics to Datadog and only host them in Grafana Cloud without having to rewrite your instrumentation.
Detailed instructions on how to set up your Datadog agents with Grafana Cloud can be found in the documentation. This feature is included with the Datadog data source plugin at no additional cost.
A new way to translate your Datadog dashboards
Our new CLI tool translates certain Datadog dashboards into Grafana dashboards, simplifying the process of bringing dashboards to Grafana Cloud for Datadog data source users.
To download the translator, download the right binary for your operating system from this list:
- datadog-dash-translator_latest_Darwin_arm64.tar.gz
- datadog-dash-translator_latest_Darwin_x86_64.tar.gz
- datadog-dash-translator_latest_Linux_arm64.tar.gz
- datadog-dash-translator_latest_Linux_armv6.tar.gz
- datadog-dash-translator_latest_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz
- datadog-dash-translator_latest_Windows_x86_64.tar.gz
Once you have downloaded a release, extract the binary from it:
# Extracting the binary and instructions
$ tar -xvf datadog-dash-translator_latest_Linux_x86_64.tar.gz
INSTRUCTIONS.md
datadog-dash-translator
Now it’s time to translate. Go to the Datadog UI and find the dashboard you want to translate. Then find its settings, and click Export dashboard JSON.
To translate it into a Grafana dashboard, run the following command:
$ ./datadog-dash-translator translate -i example-dashboard.json
INFO[0000] Successful read of datadog file "example-dashboard.json"
INFO[0000] Successful datadog dashboard translate
INFO[0000] Successful grafana dashboard write to "example-dashboard.json.grafana.json"
How to get started
You can use your Datadog metrics with Grafana Cloud in three easy steps:
- Configure the Datadog agent to submit metrics to Grafana Cloud. (You must have a Grafana Pro account; you can sign up now for a free 14-day trial)
- Configure your Grafana Cloud instance to use the Datadog data source plugin, which is available to users with a Grafana Enterprise license or a Grafana Pro account. The Datadog plugin enables the visualization of Datadog metrics in Grafana. You don’t have to point the data source at the Datadog API; the data source will directly consume metrics hosted in Grafana Cloud, allowing for faster queries.
- Run the Datadog dashboard translator to translate Datadog dashboards to the Grafana format, and upload the output to Grafana Cloud. The dashboards will connect to the Datadog data source. (Note: This feature is only available to users with a Grafana Cloud Advanced account.)
It’s that simple. You can now explore and visualize your Datadog metrics in Grafana Cloud!
Getting more value with Grafana Cloud
Our fully managed Grafana Cloud offering is the easiest way to get started with metrics, logs, traces, and dashboards, and we have plans to suit every use case. Our team is committed to helping customers find value quickly with Grafana Cloud, allowing them to bring dashboards and alerts from any system. These releases in early access are a step toward our goal of extending our big tent from visualization to querying.
This tooling around Datadog has known limitations specified in our documentation. We would love to know if some of them are blocking you. If so, please reach out, so that we know what to add next to our tools.
You can find out more by reading the documentation and the Datadog solutions page. You can also watch the “Unify your data with Grafana plugins: Splunk, MongoDB, Datadog, and more” webinar on demand.
Before you get started with this dashboard feature, you must have a Grafana Cloud Advanced subscription. Please contact us if you’d like to know more!
If you’re not already using Grafana Cloud — the easiest way to get started with observability — sign up now for a free 14-day trial of Grafana Cloud Pro, with unlimited metrics, logs, traces, and users, long-term retention, and access to one Enterprise plugin.
