Getting Started with Device Profiles

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Overview

Device profiles define which metrics to collect and how to transform them into Datadog metrics. Each profile is expected to monitor a class of similar devices from the same vendor.

The Device Onboarding Experience provides a guided, GUI-based experience to:

Seamlessly create and manage device profiles
Specify tags and metrics to be collected from your network devices
Verify the matching devices to each profile

For more information on advanced profile details, review the Profile Format Reference page.

Prerequisites

The minimum Agent version required is 7.50 or higher.

Device profile onboarding

Profile home page

The profile home page is where you can see a snapshot of the device profiles you created using the Device Onboarding Experience.

Profile details

Build your own NDM profile by navigating to Infrastructure > Network Devices > Configuration.
Click on SNMP Profiles > Create New Profile.
Provide your device profile a name, vendor information(optional) and description (optional).
Select the SysObjectID. This is what is used to match network devices to the device profiles that define what is collected and monitored from each device.

Global Tags

Add global tags for more advanced and granular options, which allows you to assign a weight to a specific metric.

Advanced Options

Modification	Description
No Modification	The device’s returned value will be used directly as the tag value.
Format	This can be mac_address or ip_address.
Extract Value	A regular expression used to extract the tag value from the SNMP value provided by the device.
Mapping	This is described here.

Scalar metrics

See Metrics Advanced Options.

Tabular metrics

See Metrics Advanced Options.

Add Tabular Tags

Adding tags to tabular metrics is similar to adding global tags, with two additional options:

Select whether the tag value originates from an OID value or a segment of the table index. If Index is chosen as the source, an index position must be specified, which then becomes the tag.
Example of using an Index position

Consider a table at OID 1.2.3.1.1 with two indices. Each row in this table includes a two-number index. Suppose column 3 of a row has OID 1.2.3.1.1.3.55.12 - here, 1.2.3.1.1 represents the table, .3 is the column number within the table, and .55.12 is the index of this specific row (all other columns for this row will also end with .55.12). If you establish a tag with the Source set to Index and Index Position set to 1, the tag’s value for metrics from this table row will be 55; if you set the index position to 2, it will be 12. If you use an index less than 1 or more than the number of indices in the table, the tag will not be populated.
See Using an Index for more information.
Use Index Transformation when you need to tag a table metric value with a value from a different table that employs a subset of this table’s index. This is not a typical scenario. You configure this by adding one or more transformation segments, each with a start and end number. These numbers index into the original table’s index to create a new index value for the new table.
Example of using Index Transformation

Consider the CPI-UNITY-MIB module. It has a table, cpiPduTable, with details about a specific PDU, and another table, cpiPduBranchTable, with information about specific PDU branches. The index of the main table is the PDU’s MAC address, such as 6.0.36.155.53.3.246. The branch table’s index is a branch ID followed by the PDU MAC, therefore a branch table row index might be 1.6.0.36.155.53.3.246. If you want to report the current on a PDU branch, you could add cpiPduBranchCurrent (OID 1.3.6.1.4.1.30932.1.10.1.3.110.1.3, from the branch table) as a tabular metric. To tag this metric with the PDU name, add cpiPduName as a tag (OID 1.3.6.1.4.1.30932.1.10.1.2.10.1.3, from the main table), then add an index transform with start:1 and end:7. This means the branch current metric from the branch table indexed with 1.6.0.36.155.53.3.246 would be tagged using the name from the main table indexed with 6.0.36.155.53.3.246.
For more information see Using a column from a different table with different indexes.

Metrics Advanced Options

The advanced options for scalar and tabular metrics are the same:

Metric Type: One of gauge, rate, monotonic_count, or monotonic_count_and_rate.
Scale Factor: Before being transmitted to Datadog, the extracted value is multiplied by this factor.
Extract Value: This is the same as the advanced options for global tags.

Apply a profile to created devices

After you save a profile, navigate back to the profile home page and select the Download All Profiles option. This allows you to download the .zip bundle which contains the yaml files for the profiles you created.
Place the yaml files in the profile directory on each of the relevant installed Agents.
Restart the Datadog Agent.
To ensure the profiles you created are accurate, confirm that NDM is receiving metrics from the matched devices as expected.