Datadog Key points — part 3

Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

Datadog “Application performance monitoring” refers to the practice of continuously monitoring and tracking the performance of applications. When an application is correctly configured to send traces to the Datadog Agent, Datadog can associate those traces with all the information it has about your infrastructure.

To configure APM in your application, Datadog provides a wizard. Go to APM > Setup & Configuration and click on the Service Setup tab. The rest of the page will guide you through instrumenting your application based on your selections.

APM is configured using Datadog’s APM libraries in application code. In a containerized environment, this can be done by setting environment variables that the libraries will look for to configure themselves. The below image shows the environmental variables for a Java based application. Visit Datadog page on Application Tracing for more information.

You can confirm that the application is sending traces to APM by either Navigating to APM > Service Catalog or running the Agent status command and then scroll down to the APM section.

datadog-agent status

Also, you can Navigate to APM > Traces, here you see a live stream of the traces APM has captured.