AWS with Datadog

AWS with Datadog

Integrating AWS with Datadog offers powerful observability into your cloud infrastructure. From monitoring EC2 instances to tracking Lambda performance, this integration provides a single pane of glass to observe logs, metrics, and traces in real-time. In this blog, we’ll walk through why you should integrate AWS with Datadog, how to set it up, and explore key features with examples.

Why Integrate AWS with Datadog?

Connecting AWS with Datadog provides benefits like:

• Unified Monitoring: View data from multiple AWS services in one dashboard.
• Enhanced Visibility: Detect bottlenecks across services like EC2, RDS, Lambda, and ELB.
• Prebuilt Dashboards: Quickly deploy default dashboards for common AWS services.
• Security & Compliance: Monitor CloudTrail logs and IAM activity.

Supported AWS Services

Datadog supports over 70 AWS services, including:

• EC2, ECS, EKS
• Lambda
• CloudFront
• S3
• CloudTrail, GuardDuty
• API Gateway
• RDS and Aurora

Steps to Integrate AWS with Datadog

There are two main ways to integrate AWS with Datadog: via the Datadog UI or using Infrastructure as Code tools like CloudFormation or Terraform.

Method 1: Integration via Datadog Console

1. Log in to your Datadog account.
2. Go to Integrations > Amazon Web Services.
3. Click Install Integration.
4. Follow the prompt to create a new AWS IAM Role with required permissions.
5. Copy the provided external ID and use this JSON policy:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::464622532012:root"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRole",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "sts:ExternalId": "datadog-external-id"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

After creating the role, paste the Role ARN into Datadog’s integration screen and save.

Method 2: Using Terraform for Integration

You can automate the integration using Terraform for IaC-based setups. Here’s a basic example:

resource "aws_iam_role" "datadog_integration" {
  name = "DatadogIntegrationRole"

  assume_role_policy = jsonencode({
    Version = "2012-10-17",
    Statement = [{
      Action = "sts:AssumeRole",
      Effect = "Allow",
      Principal = {
        AWS = "arn:aws:iam::464622532012:root"
      },
      Condition = {
        StringEquals = {
          "sts:ExternalId" = "your-external-id"
        }
      }
    }]
  })
}

Sending AWS Logs to Datadog

To forward logs like CloudTrail or Lambda logs to Datadog, set up log subscriptions in CloudWatch and use a Lambda forwarder function.

You can deploy the official Datadog Forwarder Lambda:

aws cloudformation deploy \
  --template-file datadog-forwarder.yaml \
  --stack-name datadog-log-forwarder \
  --capabilities CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM \
  --parameter-overrides \
    DdApiKey=your_datadog_api_key \
    DdSite=datadoghq.com

Monitoring AWS Lambda Functions

For monitoring Lambda functions, Datadog provides metrics like:

• Invocation count
• Duration (avg, p95)
• Error rates

Instrument your function using the Datadog Lambda Layer:

// Node.js example
const { datadog } = require("datadog-lambda-js");

exports.handler = datadog(async (event) => {
  return {
    statusCode: 200,
    body: JSON.stringify({ message: "Hello from Lambda!" }),
  };
});

Creating AWS Dashboards in Datadog

Datadog auto-generates dashboards for services like EC2, Lambda, RDS, and ELB. You can also build custom dashboards by selecting metrics like this:

aws.lambda.duration.max{region:us-east-1,account_id:123456789}
aws.ec2.cpuutilization{instance_type:t2.micro}
aws.rds.database_connections{dbinstanceidentifier:mydb}

Use tags for filtering and color-coded thresholds to visually highlight anomalies.

Setting Alerts for AWS Metrics

You can configure alerts based on AWS metrics, such as:

aws.ec2.cpuutilization{instance:my-instance} > 80

Datadog will send notifications via email, Slack, PagerDuty, or other integrations when the threshold is breached.

Conclusion

Connecting AWS with Datadog offers full-stack visibility, unified dashboards, and proactive alerting across cloud infrastructure. Whether you're a developer or SRE, the integration helps you catch issues early, reduce MTTR, and optimize cloud performance. With auto-dashboards, custom metrics, and third-party alerts, Datadog is a powerful companion to AWS observability.