Overview

Terraform supports an out-of-the-box way to import existing resources into your terraform state via the terraform import command. This can be done via the terraform import <resource_type>.<resource_name> <existing_id>.

This approach is state only and requires already having the HCL resource fully defined in your terraform configuration files. To import the configuration fully, you can use a tool like Terraformer.

Terraformer

The terraformer project allows you to import a resource as both state and HCL configuration.

Once installed, you can setup a terraform directory with a basic main.tf

This uses terraform 0.13+ syntax, but you can find more configurations on the official datadog provider docs

# main.tf

terraform {
  required_providers {
    datadog = {
      source  = "DataDog/datadog"
    }
  }
}

# Configure the Datadog provider
provider "datadog" {}

Then run terraform init from within this directory to pull the datadog terraform provider.

Now you can use terraformer to start importing resources. For example, to import Dashboard abc-def-ghi you can run

terraformer import datadog --resources=dashboard --filter=dashboard=abc-def-ghi --api-key <YOUR_API_KEY> --app-key <YOUR_APP_KEY> --api-url <YOUR_DATADOG_SITE_URL>

This generates a folder generated that contains both a terraform state file, as well as HCL terraform config files representing the imported resource.

generated
└── datadog
    └── dashboard
        ├── dashboard.tf
        ├── outputs.tf
        ├── provider.tf
        └── terraform.tfstate

• dashboard.tf: The HCL configuration file for the newly imported dashboard
• outputs.tf: An HCL containing outputs to use potentially in other configurations
• provider.tf: An HCL initialization of the provider, similar to whats in our main.tf file
• terraform.tfstate: The terraform state representing the imported dashboard

Other examples of running terraformer

All example commands require the --api-key, --app-key, and --api-url flags.

• Import all monitors: terraformer import datadog --resources=monitor
• Import monitor with id 1234: terraformer import datadog --resources=monitor --filter=monitor=1234
• Import monitors with id 1234 and 12345: terraformer import datadog --resources=monitor --filter=monitor=1234:12345
• Import all monitors and dashboards: terraformer import datadog --resources=monitor,dashboard
• Import monitor with id 1234 and dashboard with id abc-def-ghi: terraformer import datadog --resources=monitor,dashboard --filter=monitor=1234,dashboard=abc-def-ghi

Generating resources with Terraform v0.13+

As of version 0.8.10, Terraformer generates tf/json and tfstate files using Terraform v0.12.29. To ensure compatibility, run the upgrade command terraform 0.13upgrade . using Terraform v0.13.x. See official Terraform docs for upgrading.

Upgrading the generated files for Terraform v0.13+:

1. Import resource using terraformer.

2. Using Terraform v0.13.x, cd into the generated resource directory and run terraform 0.13upgrade ..

3. Run terraform init to re-run the provider installer.

4. Run terraform apply to apply upgrades to Terraform state files.