Datadog configuration of OTLP exporter

This guide walks through configuring the Apollo Router to send metrics to Datadog via the Datadog Agent. This metrics exporter is a configuration of the OTLP exporter to use with Datadog.

For general metrics configuration, refer to Router Metrics Configuration. For router instrumentation with Datadog-specific attributes, see the Router Instrumentation guide.

Connection methods

Datadog supports multiple methods for ingesting OpenTelemetry data:

• Datadog OpenTelemetry collector (DDOT) - Datadog's distribution of the OpenTelemetry Collector

• OpenTelemetry collector - Vendor-neutral telemetry pipeline with advanced processing (guide available)

• Datadog agent - Direct connection with native Datadog features (this guide)

• Agentless - Direct OTLP ingestion to Datadog

For a comprehensive overview of all OpenTelemetry setup options with Datadog, see Datadog's OpenTelemetry setup documentation.

Configuration

To export metrics to Datadog, you must configure both the router to send traces to the Datadog agent and the Datadog agent to accept OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) metrics.

Router configuration

You should enable the OTLP exporter and set both temporality: delta and endpoint: <datadog-agent-endpoint>. For example:

1telemetry:
2  exporters:
3    metrics:
4      otlp:
5        enabled: true
6        # Temporality MUST be set to delta. Failure to do this will result in incorrect metrics.
7        temporality: delta
8        # Optional endpoint, either 'default' or a URL (Defaults to http://127.0.0.1:4317)
9        endpoint: "${env.DATADOG_AGENT_HOST}:4317"

Datadog agent configuration

To configure the Datadog agent, add OTLP configuration (otlp_config) to your datadog.yaml. For example:

1otlp_config:
2  receiver:
3    protocols:
4      grpc:
5        endpoint: <dd-agent-ip>:4317

For more details about Datadog configuration, see Datadog's docs on Agent configuration.