In my last post, we discovered how to customize some of Datadog’s pre-packaged integrations to build actionable insights for SQL-backed applications quickly. In this post, we are going to dive a bit deeper and look at how we might integrate Datadog with pre-built/custom metrics tooling (such as a shell script, for example). As I wrapped up the last post, I alluded to a metric “gathered via a different route”; this metric keeps a count of the number of individual client processes running on the host.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” This quote, attributed to Peter Drucker, has held a lot of sway over the years in management circles where high-level business processes are created, iterated, tweaked, and refined to ensure that revenues (and hopefully, profits) lead to healthy, long-lasting companies. At Blue Sentry, our Managed Services offering is built upon this same maxim. We rely on several tools to provide insight into customer environments; in this post, I am going to focus on one of my newfound favorites from this toolset – Datadog – and its ability to capture custom metrics.