Documentation Grafana Cloud Instrument and send data Grafana Alloy Reference Components otelcol otelcol.exporter.datadog

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otelcol.exporter.datadog

Community: This component is developed, maintained, and supported by the Alloy user community. Grafana doesn’t offer commercial support for this component. To enable and use community components, you must set the --feature.community-components.enabled flag to true.

otelcol.exporter.datadog accepts metrics and traces telemetry data from other otelcol components and sends it to Datadog.

You can specify multiple otelcol.exporter.datadog components by giving them different labels.

Usage

alloy Copy

otelcol.exporter.datadog "LABEL" {
    api {
        api_key = "YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
    }
}

Arguments

The following arguments are supported:

If hostname is unset, the hostname is determined automatically. For more information, refer to the Datadog Fallback hostname logic documentation. This option will NOT change the hostname applied to metrics or traces if they already have hostname-identifying attributes.

Blocks

The following blocks are supported inside the definition of otelcol.exporter.datadog:

The > symbol indicates deeper levels of nesting. For example, metrics > summaries refers to a summaries block defined inside a metrics block.

api block

The api block configures authentication with the Datadog API. This is required to send telemetry to Datadog. If you do not provide the api block, you can’t send telemetry to Datadog.

The following arguments are supported:

traces block

The traces block configures the trace exporter settings.

The following arguments are supported:

If compute_stats_by_span_kind is disabled, only top-level and measured spans will have stats computed. If you are sending OTel traces and want stats on non-top-level spans, this flag must be set to true. If you are sending OTel traces and do not want stats computed by span kind, you must disable this flag and disable compute_top_level_by_span_kind.

If endpoint is unset, the value is obtained through the site parameter in the api section.

logs block

The logs block configures the logs exporter settings.

The following arguments are supported:

If use_compression is disabled, compression_level has no effect.

If endpoint is unset, the value is obtained through the site parameter in the api section.

metrics block

The metrics block configures Metric specific exporter settings.

The following arguments are supported:

Any of the subset of resource attributes in the semantic mapping list are converted to Datadog conventions and set to to metric tags whether resource_attributes_as_tags is enabled or not.

If endpoint is unset, the value is obtained through the site parameter in the api section.

exporter block

The exporter block configures the metric exporter settings.

The following arguments are supported:

histograms block

The histograms block configures the histogram settings.

The following arguments are supported:

Valid values for mode are:

• "distributions" to report metrics as Datadog distributions (recommended).
• "nobuckets" to not report bucket metrics.
• "counters" to report one metric per histogram bucket.

sums block

The sums block configures the sums settings.

The following arguments are supported:

Valid values for cumulative_monotonic_mode are:

• "to_delta" to calculate delta for sum in the client side and report as Datadog counts.
• "raw_value" to report the raw value as a Datadog gauge.

Valid values for initial_cumulative_monotonic_value are:

• "auto" reports the initial value if its start timestamp is set, and it happens after the process was started.
• "drop" always drops the initial value.
• "keep" always reports the initial value.

summaries block

The summaries block configures the summary settings.

The following arguments are supported:

Valid values for mode are:

• "noquantiles" to not report quantile metrics.
• "gauges" to report one gauge metric per quantile.

host_metadata block

The host_metadata block configures the host metadata configuration. Host metadata is the information used to populate the infrastructure list and the host map, and provide host tags functionality within the Datadog app.

The following arguments are supported:

By default, the exporter will only send host metadata for a single host, whose name is chosen according to host_metadata::hostname_source.

Valid values for hostname_source are:

• "first_resource" picks the host metadata hostname from the resource attributes on the first OTLP payload that gets to the exporter. If the first payload lacks hostname-like attributes, it will fallback to ‘config_or_system’ behavior. Do not use this hostname source if receiving data from multiple hosts.
• "config_or_system" picks the host metadata hostname from the ‘hostname’ setting, falling back to system and cloud provider APIs.

client block

The client block configures the HTTP client used by the component. Not all fields are supported by the Datadog Exporter.

The following arguments are supported:

retry_on_failure block

The retry_on_failure block configures how failed requests to Datadog are retried.

The following arguments are supported:

When enabled is true, failed batches are retried after a given interval. The initial_interval argument specifies how long to wait before the first retry attempt. If requests continue to fail, the time to wait before retrying increases by the factor specified by the multiplier argument, which must be greater than 1.0. The max_interval argument specifies the upper bound of how long to wait between retries.

The randomization_factor argument is useful for adding jitter between retrying Alloy instances. If randomization_factor is greater than 0, the wait time before retries is multiplied by a random factor in the range [ I - randomization_factor * I, I + randomization_factor * I], where I is the current interval.

If a batch hasn’t been sent successfully, it is discarded after the time specified by max_elapsed_time elapses. If max_elapsed_time is set to "0s", failed requests are retried forever until they succeed.

queue block

The queue block configures an in-memory buffer of batches before data is sent to the HTTP server.

The following arguments are supported:

When enabled is true, data is first written to an in-memory buffer before sending it to the configured server. Batches sent to the component’s input exported field are added to the buffer as long as the number of unsent batches doesn’t exceed the configured queue_size.

queue_size determines how long an endpoint outage is tolerated. Assuming 100 requests/second, the default queue size 1000 provides about 10 seconds of outage tolerance. To calculate the correct value for queue_size, multiply the average number of outgoing requests per second by the time in seconds that outages are tolerated. A very high value can cause Out Of Memory (OOM) kills.

The num_consumers argument controls how many readers read from the buffer and send data in parallel. Larger values of num_consumers allow data to be sent more quickly at the expense of increased network traffic.

debug_metrics block

The debug_metrics block configures the metrics that this component generates to monitor its state.

The following arguments are supported:

disable_high_cardinality_metrics is the Grafana Alloy equivalent to the telemetry.disableHighCardinalityMetrics feature gate in the OpenTelemetry Collector. It removes attributes that could cause high cardinality metrics. For example, attributes with IP addresses and port numbers in metrics about HTTP and gRPC connections are removed.

level is the Alloy equivalent to the telemetry.metrics.level feature gate in the OpenTelemetry Collector. Possible values are "none", "basic", "normal" and "detailed".

Exported fields

The following fields are exported and can be referenced by other components:

input accepts otelcol.Consumer data for any telemetry signal (metrics, logs, or traces).

Component health

otelcol.exporter.datadog is only reported as unhealthy if given an invalid configuration.

Debug information

otelcol.exporter.datadog does not expose any component-specific debug information.

Example

Forward Prometheus Metrics

This example forwards Prometheus metrics from Alloy through a receiver for conversion to Open Telemetry format before finally sending them to Datadog. If you are using the US Datadog APIs, the api field is required for the exporter to function.

alloy Copy

prometheus.exporter.self "default" {
}

prometheus.scrape "metamonitoring" {
  targets    = prometheus.exporter.self.default.targets
  forward_to = [otelcol.receiver.prometheus.default.receiver]
}

otelcol.receiver.prometheus "default" {
  output {
    metrics = [otelcol.exporter.datadog.default.input]
  }
}


otelcol.exporter.datadog "default" {
    api {
        api_key = "API_KEY"
    }

     metrics {
        endpoint = "https://api.ap1.datadoghq.com"
        resource_attributes_as_tags = true
    }
}

Full OTel pipeline

This example forwards metrics and traces received in Datadog format to Alloy, converts them to OTel format, and exports them to Datadog.

alloy Copy

otelcol.receiver.datadog "default" {
	output {
		metrics = [otelcol.exporter.otlp.default.input, otelcol.exporter.datadog.default input]
		traces  = [otelcol.exporter.otlp.default.input, otelcol.exporter.datadog.default.input]
	}
}

otelcol.exporter.otlp "default" {
	client {
		endpoint = "database:4317"
	}
}

otelcol.exporter.datadog "default" {
	client {
		timeout = "10s"
	}

	api {
		api_key             = "abc"
		fail_on_invalid_key = true
	}

	traces {
		endpoint             = "https://trace.agent.datadoghq.com"
		ignore_resources     = ["(GET|POST) /healthcheck"]
		span_name_remappings = {
			"instrumentation:express.server" = "express",
		}
	}

	metrics {
		delta_ttl = 1200
		endpoint  = "https://api.datadoghq.com"

		exporter {
			resource_attributes_as_tags = true
		}

		histograms {
			mode = "counters"
		}

		sums {
			initial_cumulative_monotonic_value = "keep"
		}

		summaries {
			mode = "noquantiles"
		}
	}
}

Compatible components

otelcol.exporter.datadog has exports that can be consumed by the following components:

• Components that consume OpenTelemetry otelcol.Consumer