Monitoring Amazon EBS volumes with Datadog

Datadog's AWS integration allows users to connect CloudWatch with Datadog in order to automatically collect metrics from various AWS services, including EBS. With over 650 integrations, Datadog enables the correlation of AWS metrics with those from other services within an environment. The data is accessible for 15 months at full granularity. To enhance visibility into Amazon EBS volumes and overall infrastructure, users can install the Datadog Agent on their instances. This allows for the collection of system-level metrics from volumes at a 15-second resolution. Additionally, with Datadog APM and logging, the installation of the Datadog Agent provides a fully unified monitoring platform. There are two ways to start using Datadog to monitor EBS volumes: enabling the AWS integration or installing the Datadog Agent on EC2 instances. The former approach allows for immediate pulling of all metrics outlined in the first part of this series, while the latter provides detailed monitoring of applications and infrastructure. Both methods can be used in a complementary fashion. Enabling the AWS integration requires correctly delegating AWS IAM roles and granting the Datadog role read-only access. Once set up, EBS metrics (along with EC2 and other AWS services) will flow into Datadog for visualization and monitoring on custom dashboards. Installing the Datadog Agent enables users to monitor applications and infrastructure in greater detail and depth. The Agent is installed on the root volume of an instance and can collect and forward metrics, logs, and request traces from instances. It automatically reports system-level metrics for instances and any EBS volumes mounted to them. Datadog's Live Container view provides complete coverage of container fleets with metrics reported at two-second resolution, while Live Process monitoring offers the same level of visibility into all processes running across a distributed architecture. Tags enable users to easily slice their hosts and drill down into particular problem areas in their infrastructure. Advanced alerting features like anomaly and outlier detection, forecasting, and tag-based alerting allow for effective identification of issues in dynamic environments. Datadog alerts help users stay ahead of future problems in their infrastructure and applications by notifying them of unexpected instance behavior or predicting when a certain threshold may be crossed. Users can sign up for a free 14-day trial to start monitoring their cloud infrastructure, applications, and services with Datadog.