Datadog can see almost everything in your platform. The problem is rarely missing data - it’s too much disconnected data, noisy alerts, and a bill that grows faster than your traffic. A few decisions made early make the difference between a tool your engineers trust and an expensive wall of dashboards.

This is the setup we recommend for running Datadog on Kubernetes.

Install the Agent the Kubernetes way

Deploy the Datadog Agent as a DaemonSet (one per node) together with the Cluster Agent, which collects cluster-level data and takes load off the Kubernetes API server. Either the Datadog Operator or the official Helm chart will do this; pick one and keep its configuration in Git.