(DEPRECATED) Monitor an Azure Container Service cluster with DataDog

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Warning

The Azure Container Service (ACS) is being deprecated. No new features or functionality are being added to ACS. All of the APIs, portal experience, CLI commands and documentation are marked as deprecated.

In 2017, we introduced Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for simplifying Kubernetes management, deployment, and operations. If you use the Kubernetes orchestrator, please migrate to AKS by January 31, 2020. To get started, see migrate to Azure Kubernetes Service.

For more information, see the Azure Container Service deprecation announcement on Azure.com.

Prerequisites

This walkthrough assumes that you have created a Kubernetes cluster using Azure Container Service.

It also assumes that you have the az Azure cli and kubectl tools installed.

You can test if you have the az tool installed by running:

az --version

If you don't have the az tool installed, there are instructions here.

You can test if you have the kubectl tool installed by running:

kubectl version

If you don't have kubectl installed, you can run:

az acs kubernetes install-cli

DataDog

Datadog is a monitoring service that gathers monitoring data from your containers within your Azure Container Service cluster. Datadog has a Docker Integration Dashboard where you can see specific metrics within your containers. Metrics gathered from your containers are organized by CPU, Memory, Network and I/O. Datadog splits metrics into containers and images.

You first need to create an account

Installing the Datadog Agent with a DaemonSet

DaemonSets are used by Kubernetes to run a single instance of a container on each host in the cluster. They're perfect for running monitoring agents.

Once you have logged into Datadog, you can follow the Datadog instructions to install Datadog agents on your cluster using a DaemonSet.

Conclusion

That's it! Once the agents are up and running you should see data in the console in a few minutes. You can visit the integrated kubernetes dashboard to see a summary of your cluster.