Introducing Availability Monitoring

Datadog has released an extension called Availability Monitoring in its latest Agent 5.1.0 version. This new feature introduces five types of monitors - host, integration, network, process, and custom monitors - on top of the existing metric-based ones. These monitors are designed for simplicity and can be used to monitor when a host or service is up or down. They are particularly useful in large-scale deployments due to their use of tags, which allow monitoring based on environment, data center, or AWS AMI. An example of using Availability Monitoring is demonstrated with Elasticsearch, where both host and integration monitors can be used for comprehensive coverage along with metric monitors. The API and documentation have been updated to provide more details about Availability Monitoring.