datadog

name	datadog
description	Queries Datadog monitors, metrics, logs, and dashboards via connected integration. Use when investigating alerts, APM traces, log patterns, or security signals in Datadog.

Datadog

Purpose

Use connected Datadog tooling to investigate monitors, metrics, logs, dashboards, and security signals—with correct time ranges, scopes, and tags—without inventing API results.

When to Use

• User mentions Datadog monitors, metrics, logs, APM, RUM, or security signals.
• Triage firing or muted monitors and correlate metric/log evidence.
• Build or refine monitor queries, dashboards, or notebooks when write tools exist.
• Incident investigation when Datadog is the observability source of truth.

When NOT to Use

• Grafana-only or CloudWatch-only environments → grafana, cloudwatch.
• SLO/error-budget policy design without Datadog data → error-budget-management, monitor-slos.
• Skill authoring in this repo → create-skill / publish-skill.

Expected Outcome

• Evidence from monitors, timeseries, or log queries with timeframe and scope documented.
• Monitor IDs, tags, and links included when the API returns them.
• Clear statement when org/site or API keys are unavailable.

Inputs to Gather

• Datadog site (e.g. datadoghq.com region) if not implicit in tools.
• Time window and timezone for the investigation.
• Service, env, host, or tag filters (service:, env:, etc.).
• Monitor ID/name, dashboard URL, or log query context from the user.

Workflow

1. Confirm Datadog MCP tools; read schemas for metric, log, and monitor operations.
2. Establish timeframe and tag scope before querying.
3. For alerts: get monitor status → event timeline → metric/log proof → threshold comparison.
4. For exploration: start broad, narrow by tags; avoid inventing metric names.
5. For writes (monitors/dashboards): confirm scope and notify user on production-impacting changes.
6. Summarize with monitor IDs, queries used, and recommended follow-ups.

Domain guidance

1. Scope tags early — service, env, host, version reduce noise.
2. Monitor vs metric — distinguish monitor evaluation from ad-hoc metric queries.
3. Logs + metrics — correlate trace/log IDs with metric spikes when debugging errors.
4. Security signals — treat as read-first; escalate per org process; do not auto-mute without approval.
5. Tool fidelity — only call tools defined by the integration; never fabricate timeseries points.

Typical tasks

Task	Approach
Firing monitor	Status → message/tags → metric query for window → recent events
Log investigation	Query with timeframe → pattern count → exemplar lines (redact PII)
Dashboard/monitor edit	Fetch existing definition → minimal change → validate query

Examples

User: "Why did the checkout error monitor fire?" → Load monitor, pull evaluation window metric/log evidence, list top service/version tags, compare to threshold.

User: "Show error rate for payments in prod last hour." → Metric query with service:payments and env:prod, return series summary and spike timestamps.

Tool Availability Rules

Access	Behavior
Full tool access	Run queries and approved writes; verify responses.
Read-only	Investigate and recommend monitor/query changes without applying.
No integration	Stop; do not fabricate Datadog data.

Related tool sets

• datadog
• custom-apis

Review / Decision / Execution Criteria

• Every conclusion ties to a query result or monitor state from tools.
• Use RFC3339/Unix times consistently in summaries.
• Distinguish muted, no-data, and alert states explicitly.

Output Format

1. Question and evaluated window.
2. Monitor/log/metric findings (with query snippets or IDs).
3. Tags or services implicated.
4. Blockers or permission gaps.
5. Next steps (fix, mute with approval, dashboard link).

Quality Bar

• On-call ready: what fired, why (evidence), what to check next.
• No spreadsheet or A1-style patterns—Datadog is metrics/logs/monitors only.

Safety and Boundaries

• Redact secrets and PII from log excerpts.
• Do not auto-mute or delete monitors in production without explicit approval.
• Do not fabricate monitor states or metric values.

Escalation / Dispatch Rules

• Grafana correlation → grafana when dual-stacked.
• Reliability policy → error-budget-management when discussing release freezes.
• Post-incident docs → postmortem-authoring.

References

• skills/old_skills.json (datadog) — legacy catalog (Sheets boilerplate removed).
• skills/skill.instruction.md, skills/meta.instructions.md