Datadog

Ingesting Datadog Traces directly in groundcover

In the world of eBPF, manual instrumentation is a thing of the past. However, there's no reason not to benefit from work that was already done instrumenting your services.

groundcover is fully able to ingest traces generated by Datadog APM, displaying it natively in our platform. The result is a seamless experience of combining eBPF and Datadog traces to enable even more insights into your applications.

See below for an example usage of the ingested traces, moving between viewing individual spans to a distributed tracing panel showing the entire trace.

For now we only support Datadog traces - metrics ingestion is currently unavailable

Ingesting Datadog traces

Automatic ingestion using eBPF

If groundcover is installed in an environment with an active Datadog agent, our eBPF sensor will automatically collect, ingest and display the Datadog traces generated by your services. As simple as that!

It might take a few minutes for traces to appear after installation when using this method. About the average time to make a cup of coffee ☕

Redirecting the SDKs traces endpoint

If you don't have an active Datadog agent, or you wish to send the traces to groundcover directly - we got you covered. After instrumenting a service with Datadog's SDK, apply the following env variables to redirect the traces to be collected by groundcover.

Below are 2 options for the values: Default is for installations that use the default namespace (groundcover) and default release name (groundcover). Custom is for installations where the namespace or release name were changed, and will require the custom values.

Default

env:
  - name: DD_TRACE_AGENT_URL
    value: "http://groundcover-alligator.groundcover.svc.cluster.local:8126"

Custom

env:
  - name: DD_TRACE_AGENT_URL
    value: "http://<release_name>-alligator.<namespace>.svc.cluster.local:8126"

When applied to an instrumented service, traces generated by it will be exported to our DaemonSet, and from there, ingested directly to the platform.

Keep in mind - using this method will stop sending traces to the Datadog agent, meaning they will not appear in Datadog's platform

Turning off Datadog ingestion

Datadog traces will be ingested by default in both of the manners described above. However, it's completely possible to turn off ingestion using the following override:

agent:
  alligator:
    apmIngestor:
      dataDog:
        enabled: false