How to monitor EC2 instances with Datadog

Amazon CloudWatch is an excellent starting point for monitoring EC2 instances and AWS services. However, integrating CloudWatch with Datadog provides a more detailed and comprehensive view of the entire infrastructure. Datadog automatically collects performance metrics for EC2 and other AWS services while retaining data for 15 months at full granularity. Installing the Datadog Agent on instances enables additional system-level metric collection, including memory, disk latency, and others. With over 650 integrations, Datadog allows users to visualize, correlate, and alert on metrics from AWS and other systems in one place. EC2 + Datadog integration is beneficial for monitoring infrastructure, applications, and services. There are two ways to start monitoring EC2 instances with Datadog: enabling the AWS integration or installing the Datadog Agent. The former allows users to pull full AWS metrics into Datadog without installing anything on their instances, while the latter provides detailed monitoring of applications and infrastructure.