Agent main configuration file

Configuration files for Agent checks and integrations are stored in the conf.d directory.

The Agent v6 configuration file uses YAML to better support complex configurations, and to provide a consistent configuration experience, as Checks also use YAML configuration files. Therefore, datadog.conf (v5) is retired in favor of datadog.yaml (v6).

The location of the conf.d directory differs depending on the operating system.

See the sample config_template.yaml file for all available configuration options.

Agent configuration directory

Prior releases of Datadog Agent stored configuration files in /dd-agent/conf.d/. Starting with the 6.0 release, configuration files are stored in the conf.d directory. The location of the directory differs depending on the operating system.

Check configuration files

An example for each Agent check configuration file is found in the conf.yaml.example file in the corresponding <CHECK_NAME>.d/ folder. Rename this file to conf.yaml to enable the associated check. Note: The Agent loads valid YAML files contained in the folder: /etc/datadog-agent/conf.d/<CHECK_NAME>.d/. This allows complex configurations to be broken down into multiple files. For example, a configuration for the http_check might look like this:

/etc/datadog-agent/conf.d/http_check.d/
├── backend.yaml
└── frontend.yaml

A special case are YAML files with the suffix .default. These files are loaded by the Agent by default and help define the core set of checks that are always enabled (CPU, memory, uptime …). They are ignored if any other configuration are found for that check, therefore you can safely ignore them. If you want to disable one of the default checks, remove that file. To configure these checks, conf.yaml.example should be used as a base.

Autodiscovery template files are stored in the configuration folder with the auto_conf.yaml file. For example, for the Redis check, here is the configuration in redisdb.d/:

/etc/datadog-agent/conf.d/redisdb.d/
├── auto_conf.yaml
└── conf.yaml.example

For log collection, the Agent does not accept multiple YAML files that point to the same log source to prevent duplicate logs from being sent to Datadog. In the case where there is more than one YAML file that points to the same log source, the Agent considers the files in alphabetical order and uses the first file.

To preserve backwards compatibility, the Agent still picks up configuration files in the form /etc/dd-agent/conf.d/<CHECK_NAME>.yaml, but migrating to the new layout is strongly recommended.

JMX configuration file

JMX Agent checks have an additional metrics.yaml file in their configuration folder. It is a list of all the beans that the Datadog Agent collects by default. This way, you do not need to list all of the beans manually when you configure a check through Docker labels or k8s annotations.