Dashboard Template for Datadog

This guide walks through using Apollo's pre-configured template to create Datadog dashboards and monitor your Apollo Router.

Install the dashboard template

1. In your Datadog account, navigate to Dashboards > New Dashboard and create a new blank dashboard.

2. Copy the JSON content from the dashboard template.

3. Paste the JSON content into your new blank dashboard and accept the prompt to overwrite it.

4. Update the dashboard name and teams as desired.

Use the dashboard template

Configure template variables

After you install the template, configure the template variables to match the appropriate tag values for your router instances and ensure the relevant telemetry data is being sent to Datadog. For details on that configuration, see the Router Instrumentation guide.

The dashboard is pre-configured to use Datadog's unified service tagging to filter the dashboard views. If you followed the instrumentation guide, these values are already configured. If you have created your own configuration, follow the Datadog documentation to apply them appropriately.

Interpret the dashboard

Each section and metric includes a description of what it represents and why it matters. The sections are ordered to guide you through a typical investigation workflow, starting with high-level service metrics that provide quick insights and become more specific in the later sections.

Follow best practices

• This dashboard is a starting point. Modify it to suit your particular needs.

• Be aware of metric cardinality. A high number of tag values on a high-volume metric can lead to high costs from Datadog.

• In high-traffic volume environments, use trace sampling to reduce the volume of data sent to Datadog.

Keep the dashboard up to date

Apollo plans to support keeping the dashboard in sync with upstream changes via tagged releases and Terraform modules. Until versioning and distribution is implemented, Apollo will treat the dashboard template as an immutable artifact unless router telemetry becomes incompatible with the template.

In that exceptional case, Apollo recommends the following process to update your dashboard:

1. On the Datadog UI, select Share > Export dashboard JSON

2. Make a fork of the template repository

3. Reset the HEAD state of the fork to the commit you imported the dashboard from

   • Select a commit hash from the file history based on commit title if you aren't certain

4. Overwrite the datadog/graphos-template.json file with your exported dashboard JSON and commit it

5. Sync your fork from the upstream repository and apply merge conflicts with your committed file, retaining any customizations you wish to keep

6. Import your merged JSON file into the dashboard using the install instructions