Configuring Datadog Observer jobs

Using the Datadog Observer functionality, you can load monitored hosts and their associated processes, and then visualize this data as a topology view in the Agile Service Manager UI.

Before you begin

Restriction: The Datadog Observer is only available as a technical preview. Use of the technical preview feature is unsupported for production environments.
Important: The Datadog Observer supports the cloud/SaaS Datadog version.

Ensure you have the Datadog server details to hand, such as the data tenant, API server URL, Auth API key and App key.

The observer is installed as part of the core installation procedure.

About this task

A Datadog Observer job extracts host and its associated processes from Datadog via REST API. The Observer loads and updates the resources and their relationships within the Netcool Agile Service Manager core topology service.

You define and start the following job.
Full Topology Upload job
Run this job whenever you need Datadog topology data refreshed.
By default, these jobs are one-off, transient jobs that perform a full upload of all requested topology data as soon as they are triggered.
You can also run these jobs (again) manually from the Observer UI, or schedule them to run at set times when configuring them.

Procedure

  1. On the Observer jobs page, perform one of the following actions:
    To edit an existing job
    Open the List of options overflow menu next to the job and click View & edit.
    To create a new job
    Click Add a new job + and select the Datadog Observer tile.
  2. Define or edit the following parameters, then click Save to save your job and begin retrieving information.
    Table 1. Datadog Observer job parameters
    Parameter Action Details
    Unique ID Enter a unique name for the job Required
    Data Tenant Enter the data tenant to track the Datadog topology Required
    API server URL Enter the Datadog API base URL Required
    Auth API key Specify the authorized API key to authorize with Datadog Required
    App key Specify the application key to access the Datadog resources Required
    Configure Host API query

    Specify the host API query.

    Each query parameters needs to be separated by a semicolon ';' and its value needs to be inside parenthesis '( )'. For parameters that support lists, the values need to be separated by commas ',', which the API will treat as an AND operation.

    		 Optional
    Configure Process API query

    Specify the process API query.

    Each query parameters needs to be separated by a semicolon ';' and its value needs to be inside parenthesis '( )'. For parameters that support lists, the values need to be separated by commas ',', which the API will treat as an AND operation.

    		 Optional
    Datadog certificate Specify the Datadog certificate to enable secure connection to the target system Optional.
    For more information, see Configuring observer job security.
    On-prem
    Create and store the certificate in the ASM_HOME/security directory.
    OCP
    Obtain the authentication certificate using OpenSSL and store it as a secret.
    Certificate validation Choose whether to use SSL validation ('true' or 'false'). Turning SSL validation off will use HTTPS without host verification. Optional
    Connection and read timeout (milliseconds) Set the connection and read timeout value. Optional
    Trust all certificates Trust all certificates without validating the certificate's contents. Choose 'true' or 'false' Optional
    Number of connection retries Set the number of times a connection should try again. The default value is '3'. Optional
    Delay before a connection retry (milliseconds) Specify the period of time in milliseconds to delay before a connection tries again. Optional
    Access scope

    Enter text to provide a scope for the resources.

    Access scope can help map alerts to resources when resources in different scopes share the same parameters, such as matchTokens.

    		 Optional.
    Tip: You can define access scope for locations, project names, namespaces, etc.
    Generate debug support file
    Set the optional Generate debug support file parameter to 'True' in order to capture the output of the next scheduled job run as a file. This file will be stored with an observer's log files and can be used to debug observer issues, for example at the request of your designated Support team, or while using a test environment. For one-off jobs (that is, Load jobs), this parameter reverts to 'False' after the next completed run. To examine the output produced, you can load the generated debug file using the File Observer. The file is saved to the following locations:
    On-prem
    $ASM_HOME/logs/<obs>-observer/
    On OCP
    /var/log/itsm/<obs>-observer
    		 Optional
    Observer job description Enter additional information to describe the job. Optional
    Job schedule

    Specify when the job should run, and whether it should run at regular intervals.

    By default the job runs immediately, and only once.

    Optionally you can specify a future date and time for the job to run, and then set it to run at regular intervals after that.

    Optional. Transient (one-off) jobs only.

    If you set a job schedule, the run intervals must be at least 90 seconds apart, and if you set them at less than 15 minutes, a warning is displayed, as the frequency can impact system performance.