Datadog


Datadog is an observability platform for cloud-scale applications. Integrating your Render services and databases with Datadog can provide your applications with fine-tuned metrics, monitoring, and automated alerting.

Getting Started

Sign up for a Datadog account if you don’t already have one. Then, create or retrieve an API key from your Datadog organization settings page. Ensure that you’re creating an API key for your organization. The Datadog integration will not work with an application key or a user-scoped API key.

You can validate that you have correctly generated an API key by calling Datadog’s validate endpoint with your key.

Datadog API settings

Setting up Postgres monitoring

Render currently only supports the US1 Datadog site which uses the app.datadoghq.com domain. Postgres monitoring does not work with other Datadog sites such as EU1, US3, and US5.

While creating a Postgres database, enter your Datadog API key in the respective field, as shown below. Adding an API key will enable a Datadog agent to run alongside your Postgres instance and report metrics to your Datadog account.

Datadog API settings

The metrics reported by the Datadog agent are all native to the Datadog platform, so you will not be charged any fees for custom metrics.

Attaching a Datadog API key is only supported for new databases. If you would like to enable this for an existing database, please reach out to support@render.com with the following information:

  • The Database ID is that you want Datadog enabled on
  • US West coast business hours (with a minimum of 24 hours notice) when we can restart your database. Note that there will be a brief moment of downtime while your database restarts.
  • Set your Datadog API token as an environment variable on a Service or Environment Group. Include the location of this variable in your message to support. Do not send your api key in plain text over.

Available metrics

While the Render Dashboard metrics provide you with the core Postgres metrics, using Datadog can provide more detailed metrics about the Postgres instance host environment. You can also use Datadog as a centralized location for dashboards and automated alerts.

The following Datadog integrations are fully supported, and you can view all the metrics listed in the documentation linked below.

  • Postgres - metrics related to your PostgreSQL instance
  • Disk - metrics related to disk usage and IO for your Postgres volume
  • Network - metrics related to TCP/IP network stats of instance

In addition to the above integrations, the following metrics are also reported:

MetricDescription
system.cpu.num_coresThe number of CPUs, as chosen by your database instance type
system.cpu.systemThe percentage of time the CPU spent running the kernel
system.cpu.userThe percentage of time the CPU spent running user space processes
system.mem.freeThe amount of free RAM
system.mem.totalThe total amount of physical RAM, as chosen by your database instance type
system.mem.usedThe amount of RAM in use

Viewing the metrics

Within Datadog, you can see the metrics on any dashboard or metrics explorer page. You will be able to filter metrics by the database-id tag equal to your Render Postgres database ID. The screenshot below is an example of some metrics you can view.

Datadog Postgres metrics

Setting up Log Streams

At the moment, Render only supports TCP log forwarding with TLS, so check the Datadog docs to confirm if TCP log forwarding is supported for your site.

You can use Datadog as a logging provider for Render Log Streams, which will allow you to view and manage logs from any Render service or databases directly from your Datadog dashboard.

To set this up, follow the instructions from the log stream docs, using your Datadog API key and the endpoint that corresponds to your Datadog site:

Datadog SiteEndpoint
US1intake.logs.datadoghq.com:10516
EUtcp-intake.logs.datadoghq.eu:443