Greetings tech aficionados! Today, we delve into the world of infrastructure as code (IAC), focusing on using Terraform to deploy Datadog dashboards and monitoring.

Datadog is an impressive tool that offers real-time performance tracking and visualizations that aid software teams in deeply understanding their systems. Terraform, on the other hand, is an open-source infrastructure as code tool built by HashiCorp. It allows users to define and provide data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language. By leveraging Terraform, we can script our dashboard setups, avoid manual clicks and set up a system that can be version controlled, reproducible, and ready for continuous deployment.

Let’s dive right into how to use Terraform to deploy your Datadog dashboards.

SET UP

Firstly, you’ll need to have an established Terraform environment. If you’re new to Terraform, you can download it from the official website. You also need to have access to Datadog API and App keys to communicate with Datadog. These keys will be used by Terraform to set up dashboards in Datadog.

Terraform Provider for Datadog

Next, you’ll have to declare the Datadog provider in your Terraform configuration file. Here’s a simple example:

provider "datadog" {
    api_key = "your_datadog_api_key"
    app_key = "your_datadog_application_key"
}

Defining the Dashboard Resource

In Terraform, the set-up you need (like users, roles, databases, dashboards, etc.) is generally referred to as a resource. For example, we use datadog_dashboard to define a Datadog dashboard. Below is a simple dashboard configuration.

resource "datadog_dashboard" "STATS" {
    title        = "My STATS"
    description  = "A TABLE with important metrics"
    layout_type  = "ordered"
    is_read_only = "true"
    widget {
        event_stream_definition {
            query = "*"
            event_size = "l"
            title = "All events"
        }
        layout = {
            height = 20
            width = 30
            x = 0
            y = 0
        }
    }
}

Apply Changes

After you’ve defined the dashboard, run the terraform plan command to review the changes. Once you’re sure you’re prepared to deploy, run terraform apply to create the dashboard in Datadog.

The great thing about using Terraform is that you can modify the dashboard’s resource block and repeat the process to update your Dashboard. You can version control the set-up, making it easy to replicate across different environments.

Monitoring Alerts

Not only can you create dashboards, but you can also create monitors — a fantastic feature of Datadog. Monitors provide alerts and notifications when a specified metric meets certain conditions. Below is a block of Terraform configuration for defining a datadog monitor.

resource "datadog_monitor" "anomaly" {
    name = "Anomaly detection on data points."
    type = "query alert"
    query = "avg(last_4h):anomalies(avg:aws.ec2.cpuutilization{environment:prod} by {instance-id}, 'basic', 2, direction='both', alert_window='last_5m', interval=20, count_default_zero='false', seasonality='daily') >= 1"
    message = "Notify @TEAM if the cpu utilisation is unusually high or low."
}

Terraform’s simplicity combined with the power of Datadog’s advanced monitoring and alerting capabilities results in more time spent improving your applications and less time clicking around web interfaces.

By using Terraform for deploying your Datadog dashboards, you shift from manual, error-prone deployments to automatic, error-free deployments. This way, your team can build better, more reliable software, and most importantly, you create a much more efficient DevOps culture.