The Datadog Agent is an infrastructure monitoring agent and host telemetry collector. It functions as a background process that gathers system metrics and application health data to send to a centralized monitoring platform.
The project operates as a plugin-based metric collector, using a modular system of independent check scripts to gather data from various third-party services and applications. It serves as a remote telemetry transmitter, providing a pipeline to stream infrastructure and system information to a remote analysis and alerting backend.
Its capabilities cover application performance monitoring, host resource tracking, and infrastructure performance monitoring. The agent collects low-level system telemetry from the operating system kernel and filesystem while aggregating application-level performance data to identify service degradation.
