Datadog Agent for Windows

The Datadog Agent for Windows is a lightweight software component that collects metrics, logs, and traces from your Windows infrastructure and sends them to Datadog for analysis and visualization. It enables you to monitor system performance, application health, and custom metrics across your Windows environments. The agent runs as a service on Windows hosts and can be configured to collect data from various sources including the operating system, applications, and integrations.

Install Datadog Agent

Run the following command in PowerShell with administrator privileges on the Windows host instance. It starts collecting and reporting metrics on CPU, memory, network, and uptime for the host instance.

Replace the placeholder <KFUSE-DNS> with the correct endpoint name.

Basic Installation
$env:DD_UPGRADE="true"
$env:DD_API_KEY="kloudfuse"
$env:DD_URL="https://<KFUSE-DNS>/ingester"
Start-BitsTransfer -Source "https://s3.amazonaws.com/ddagent-windows-stable/datadog-agent-7-latest.amd64.msi" -Destination "$env:TEMP\datadog-agent-7-latest.amd64.msi"
Start-Process msiexec.exe -Wait -ArgumentList "/qn /i $env:TEMP\datadog-agent-7-latest.amd64.msi APIKEY=$env:DD_API_KEY DD_URL=$env:DD_URL"
powershell

Collect Metrics

By enabling checks, such as OpenMetrics check, you can direct Datadog to collect additional metrics.

Copy the following example into your conf.yaml file in the openmetrics.d directory.

Collect OpenMetrics
Copy-Item "C:\ProgramData\Datadog\conf.d\openmetrics.d\conf.yaml.example" `
          "C:\ProgramData\Datadog\conf.d\openmetrics.d\conf.yaml"
powershell

For more examples, see Datadog documentation on OpenMetrics.

Collect Logs

Edit your C:\ProgramData\Datadog\datadog.yaml file to collect logs.

Collect logs
additional_endpoints:
  "https://<KFUSE-DNS>/ingester":
  - apikey1
logs_enabled: true

metadata_providers:
  - name: host
    interval: 300

use_v2_api:
  series: true

enable_payloads:
  events: false
  series: false
  service_checks: false
  sketches: false
process_config:
  expvar_port: 0
  cmd_port: 0

logs_config:
  logs_dd_url: <KFUSE-DNS>:443
  logs_no_ssl: false
  force_use_http: true
  use_compression: true
  use_v2_api: false
yaml

Starting with v6.19+/v7.19+, Datadog uses HTTPS transport; see Datadog documentation on https://docs.datadoghq.com/agent/logs/log_transport/?tab=https [Agent Transport for Logs,role=external,window=_blank].

Add Source Files

To add source files for collection, see Datadog documentation of Custom log collection.

You must specify the start_position setting in the custom conf.yaml file if you are tailing custom files, to ensure that you receive all the data and not just the "live" data.

Restart Datadog Agent Service

After making configuration changes, restart the Datadog Agent service:

Restart-Service -Name datadogagent
powershell

Get Kloudfuse and Datadog Logs

For Dual Shipping, use the following configuration:

Dual Shipping Logs for Datadog and Kloudfuse
logs_enabled: true

logs_config:
  logs_dd_url: <DATADOG_DNS>:443
  logs_no_ssl: false
  force_use_http: true
  use_compression: true
  use_v2_api: false
  additional_endpoints:
    - api_key: apikey1
      Host: "<KFUSE-DNS>"
      Port: 443
      use_compression: true
      use_http: true
      use_v2_api: false
yaml

Collect Events

Edit your C:\ProgramData\Datadog\datadog.yaml file to collect events.

Be sure to enable the collect_events option. If this option is missing or set to false, you need to enable it.

Use this configuration to enable the collection of Windows events and system events (such as service status changes or system changes).

Collect events
collect_events: true
yaml

After making configuration changes, restart the Datadog Agent service:

Restart-Service -Name datadogagent
powershell

Collect Traces

To collect traces from applications running on Windows, configure the Datadog Agent to interact with OpenTracing or OpenTelemetry instrumented applications.

  1. Open the C:\ProgramData\Datadog\datadog.yaml file and set the apm_config to true:

    apm_config:
  enabled: true
    yaml

  2. Restart the Datadog Agent service to apply the changes:

    Restart-Service -Name datadogagent
    powershell

  3. For each application, instrument your applications with Datadog’s APM (Application Performance Monitoring).

    Simply add the Datadog APM libraries to your application — dd-trace for Python, ddtrace for Java, and so on.

  4. Enable the Datadog APM agent by setting environment variables for your application:

    $env:DD_AGENT_HOST="localhost"
$env:DD_TRACE_ENABLED="true"
$env:DD_ENV="<YOUR_ENV_NAME>"  # e.g., "production"
$env:DD_SERVICE="<YOUR_SERVICE_NAME>"  # e.g., "web-app"
$env:DD_VERSION="<YOUR_SERVICE_VERSION>"
    powershell