Datadog Fundamental Certification: The Study Guide

What is the Datadog Fundamental exam?

Datadog Fundamental Exam Preparation Guide

Computer Fundamentals

1. Config File Modification
What Are Config Files? How to Edit Them Safely
Most apps are configured via menu options, and some require you to edit a config file. But how do you use a config file?

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/config-files-can-edit/

Some programs require you to configured via editing a text file for the software to run as you wish.
These text files configure the software and are — unsuprusingly enought — called “config files”.
Config files are essentially editable text fiels that contain information required for the successful operation of a program. The files are structured in a particular way, formatted to be user configurable.



Config files are structured in a format of the developer’s own design. Others use known standards used to structure data, like: JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, YAML (YAML Ain’t Markup Language), and XML (eXtensible Markup Language).
Some programs load the information stored in their config files when they start. Meanwhile other periodically check the config file to see it has been changed.

2. Operating Systems

3. Programming Languages

4. Hardware Concepts

5. Shell

6. Metadata

7. Networking

• What backend language supported by Datadog

• Something about swap in memory, what it is used for

• And about page fault, where it is happen in computer?

• Networking talks about subnet mask, there are 2 questions there

Infrastructure Development

1. Agent Installation

The Datadog Agent is software that runs on your hosts. It collects events and metrics from hosts and sends them to Datadog.

It is recommended to fully install the Agent.

2. API Key

API keys are unique to your organization. An API key is required by the Datadog Agent to submit metrics and events to Datadog. [*]

Your org must have at least one API key and at most 50 API keys. [*]

3. Application Key

Application keys, in conjunction with your organization’s API key, give users access to Datadog’s programmatic API. [*]

Application keys are associated with the user account that created them and by default have the permission and scopes of the user who created them. [*]

If a user’s account is disabled, any application keys that the user created are revoked. Any API keys that were created by the disabled account are not deleted, and are still valid. [*]



The Datadog API is an HTTP REST API. The API uses resource-oriented URLs to call the API, uses status codes to indicate the success or failure of requests, return JSON from all requests, and uses standard HTTP response code. [*]

Authenticate to API with an API key using the header DD-API-KEY. For some endpoints, you also need an Application key, which uses the header DD-APPLICATION-KEY . [*]

Use the Datadog HTTP API to access the Datadog platform programmatically. You can use the API to send data to Datadog, build data visualizations, and manage your account.

4. Running the Agent
In Ubuntu, it is reccomended to use the service manager sudo service datadog-agent status meanwhile systemctl is used in Red Hat system.

5. Agent Hostname

The Agent can send its own configuration to Datadog to be displayed in the Agent Configuration section of the host detail panel. [*]

The Agent configuration is scrubbed of any sensitive information and only contains configuration you’ve set using the configruation file or environment variables. The configuration changes are updated every 10 minutes. [*]

• Datadog reccomendation when installing Agent on Ubuntu / Linux system? One-line command?

• API Key formal definition, something like “alphanumeric string bla bla” or “unique identifier bla bla” which one?

• Different between API Key and Application Key? What is the use of Application Key?

• What happen to API Key and Application Key when user create it removed from organization

• Canonical hostname

Networking & Agent Configuration

1. Datadog Ports
Open the following ports to benefit from all the Agent functionalities:
Outbound:

Functionality	Port / Protocol
Agent APM Containers Live Processes Metrics	443 / TCP
Custom Agent Autoscaling	8443 / TCP
Log Collection	10516 / TCP
NTP	123 / UDP

Inbound:

Functionality	Port / Protocol
Agent Browser GUI	5002 / TCP
APM receiver	8126 / TCP
DogStatsD	8125 / UDP
go_expvar server (APM)	5012 / TCP
go_expvar integration server	5000 / TCP
IPC API	5001 / TCP
Process Agent debug	6062 / TCP
Process Agent runtime	6162 / TCP

2. Datadog IP Addresses

3. Auto-discovery

• Port to check metrics or something, port 5001? And what each port use for?

• Something like https://ip-addresses.datadoghq.com is come out in exam. What is that?
• So it seems the URL: https://ip-ranges.datadoghq.com/ is used to get information about Datadog IP ranges [*]
• The topic is under API Reference so I may need to be familiar a little bit with some of API used on Datadog [*]

• How to specify auto-discovery. Something like discovering specific container nginx, how to define it on configuration file?

Data Collection

1. DogStatsD

2. Crawlers

3. Agent Integrations

4. API Endpoints

5. Tagging Best Practices

6. Metrics & Timeseries

• What feature taking from StatsD by DogStatsD?

• What is Crawlers? It come out often actually. From different between crawlers and agent-based integrations, about its functionality which is to push metrics or to pull metrics?

• All above concepts must can be explain deliberately by just hear the terms

Troubleshooting Datadog

1. Agent Commands

2. Agent Logs

3. Agent Config Files

• There are some command that show up on option: flare, diagnose, check, configchek

• What are all commands available? I should familiar with some of it

• How to inspect logs

• And the directory structure, I should familiar. It come out often: cheks, conf.d, whether cheks.d is exist or not I’m not sure back then

Data Visualization & Utilization

1. Host Map

2. Dashboards

3. Using Metrics

4. Using Tags

5. Monitors and Alerts

• Host Map use for highlight or visualize

• Basic terms for Dashboard, its functionality like event report

• NoProxy in datadog config, is it use for metrics?

• Al kind of monitors and alerts need hands-on practice

Datadog Fundamental Certification Resoruces

Introduction to Observability

• Monitoring is the act of paying attention to the patterns that your metrics are telling you. It’s about analyzing your data and acting on it.

• Performance
By watching performance we can watch how our architecture and applications are using the resources that are available

• Security
Is something going wrong in our environment? Creating monitors around security metrics can stop incidents in their tracks.

• Usage
What are our users doing in our environment? Are they interacting with our products?

[17.82, 22:11:01]
[ 6.38, 22:11:12]
[ 2.87, 22:11:38]
[ 7.06, 22:12:00]

• Baseline for Operations
Metrics can tell us what normal looks like for our applications. Without metrics, we’re stuck guessing what’s going on.

• Reactive Responses
Using metrics we don’t have to wait until a customer reports an outage. We can react to issues in our environment before they snowball

• Proactive Responses
Why wait for something to go wrong? By looking at metrics we can get ahead of problems before they happen.

Datadog is an observability platform for cloud-scale applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, through a SaaS-based data analytics platform