Datadog Concepts Monitors and Alerting
External
Internal
Overview
When something goes wrong, a computer tells you about it. This is what a monitor is: a Datadog feature that actively checks metrics, integration availability, network endpoints, etc. and communicates when an alerting condition occurs. The monitor has a query and alert conditions. There are different monitor types.
Monitor Types
Metric
Metric monitors watch a continuous stream of data. The metrics are collected via the Datadog Agent or the API and can be alerted upon if they cross a threshold (for example) over a given period of time. Other alert detection methods are available.
Any metric currently reporting to Datadog is available for monitors.
Alert Detection Method
Threshold
A threshold alert compares metric values to a static threshold. This is the standard alert case. On each alert evaluation, Datadog calculates average/min/max/sum over the selected period and checks if it is above or below the threshold. The distribution metric type offers additional threshold options of calculating percentiles over the selected period.
Change
Anomaly
Outliers
Forecast
Host
A host monitor listens to the Datadog Agent heartbeats and notifies on the status of the heartbeat. This could give an indication whether the hosts the Agents run on are responsive. Every Datadog Agent reports a service check called datadog.agent.up with the status OK. The Host monitor has two kind of alert conditions: Check Alert and Cluster Alert.