Overview

Datadog can automatically discover the dependencies for an instrumented service, such as a database, a queue, or a third-party API, even if that dependency hasn’t been instrumented yet. By analyzing outbound requests from your instrumented services, Datadog infers the presence of these dependencies and collects associated performance metrics.

With the new inferred entities experience, you can filter Service Catalog entries by entity type, such as database, queue, or third-party API. This allows you to better visualize service dependencies using the Service Page dependency map and APM features.

To determine the names and types of the inferred service dependencies, Datadog uses standard span attributes and maps them to peer.* attributes. For the full list of peer.* attributes, see Inferred service dependencies nomenclature. Inferred external APIs use the default naming scheme net.peer.name. For example, api.stripe.com, api.twilio.com, us6.api.mailchimp.com. Inferred databases use the default naming scheme db.instance.

If you’re using the Go, Java, NodeJS, PHP, .NET, or Ruby tracer, you can customize the default names for inferred entities.

Note: If you configure monitors, dashboards, or notebooks for a given inferred service during the beta, you may need to update them if the naming scheme changes. Read more about migration steps in the opt-in instructions.

Service page Dependency map

Use the dependency map to visualize service-to-service communication and gain insight into system components such as databases, queues, and third-party dependencies. You can group dependencies by type and filter by Requests, Latency, or Errors to identify slow or failing connections.

Opt in

To opt in, Datadog recommends you adjust your:

• Datadog Agent (or OpenTelemetry collector) configuration
• APM tracing libraries configuration

Datadog Agent configuration

Datadog Agent 7.55.1 and higher

From Datadog Agent version >= 7.55.1, update your datadog.yaml configuration file with the following:

apm_config:
  compute_stats_by_span_kind: true
  peer_tags_aggregation: true

Alternatively, configure this by setting the following environment variables in your Datadog Agent launch configuration:

DD_APM_COMPUTE_STATS_BY_SPAN_KIND=true 
DD_APM_PEER_TAGS_AGGREGATION=true

Datadog Agent version between 7.50.3 and 7.54.1

If you use a Datadog Agent version >= 7.50.3 and <= 7.54.1, update your datadog.yaml configuration file with the following:

apm_config:
  compute_stats_by_span_kind: true
  peer_tags_aggregation: true
  peer_tags: ["_dd.base_service","amqp.destination","amqp.exchange","amqp.queue","aws.queue.name","aws.s3.bucket","bucketname","cassandra.keyspace","db.cassandra.contact.points","db.couchbase.seed.nodes","db.hostname","db.instance","db.name","db.namespace","db.system","grpc.host","hostname","http.host","http.server_name","messaging.destination","messaging.destination.name","messaging.kafka.bootstrap.servers","messaging.rabbitmq.exchange","messaging.system","mongodb.db","msmq.queue.path","net.peer.name","network.destination.name","peer.hostname","peer.service","queuename","rpc.service","rpc.system","server.address","streamname","tablename","topicname"]

Alternatively, configure this by setting the following environment variables in your Datadog Agent launch configuration:

DD_APM_COMPUTE_STATS_BY_SPAN_KIND=true 
DD_APM_PEER_TAGS_AGGREGATION=true
DD_APM_PEER_TAGS='["_dd.base_service","amqp.destination","amqp.exchange","amqp.queue","aws.queue.name","aws.s3.bucket","bucketname","cassandra.keyspace","db.cassandra.contact.points","db.couchbase.seed.nodes","db.hostname","db.instance","db.name","db.namespace","db.system","grpc.host","hostname","http.host","http.server_name","messaging.destination","messaging.destination.name","messaging.kafka.bootstrap.servers","messaging.rabbitmq.exchange","messaging.system","mongodb.db","msmq.queue.path","net.peer.name","network.destination.name","peer.hostname","peer.service","queuename","rpc.service","rpc.system","server.address","streamname","tablename","topicname"]'

Helm

Include the same set of environment variables in your values.yaml file.

OpenTelemetry Collector

Minimum version recommended: opentelemetry-collector-contrib >= v0.95.0.

Example collector.yaml.

connectors:
  datadog/connector:
    traces:
      compute_stats_by_span_kind: true
      peer_tags_aggregation: true
      peer_tags: ["_dd.base_service","amqp.destination","amqp.exchange","amqp.queue","aws.queue.name","aws.s3.bucket","bucketname","db.cassandra.contact.points","db.couchbase.seed.nodes","db.hostname","db.instance","db.name","db.namespace","db.system","grpc.host","hostname","http.host","http.server_name","messaging.destination","messaging.destination.name","messaging.kafka.bootstrap.servers","messaging.rabbitmq.exchange","messaging.system","mongodb.db","msmq.queue.path","net.peer.name","network.destination.name","peer.hostname","peer.service","queuename","rpc.service","rpc.system","server.address","streamname","tablename","topicname"]

If your collector version is below v0.95.0, use an exporter configuration with the following peer_tags:

exporters:
  datadog:
    traces:
      compute_stats_by_span_kind: true
      peer_tags_aggregation: true
      peer_tags: ["_dd.base_service","amqp.destination","amqp.exchange","amqp.queue","aws.queue.name","aws.s3.bucket","bucketname","db.cassandra.contact.points","db.couchbase.seed.nodes","db.hostname","db.instance","db.name","db.namespace","db.system","grpc.host","hostname","http.host","http.server_name","messaging.destination","messaging.destination.name","messaging.kafka.bootstrap.servers","messaging.rabbitmq.exchange","messaging.system","mongodb.db","msmq.queue.path","net.peer.name","network.destination.name","peer.hostname","peer.service","queuename","rpc.service","rpc.system","server.address","streamname","tablename","topicname"]   

APM tracing library configuration

The new nomenclature: What is changing

List of newly introduced peer.* tags

Global default service naming migration

When you enable the DD_TRACE_REMOVE_INTEGRATION_SERVICE_NAMES_ENABLED environment variable, it improves how service-to-service connections and inferred services are represented in Datadog visualizations, across all supported tracing library languages and integrations.

Previously, some tracing libraries included the name of the associated integration in service name tagging. For example, .NET tagged gRPC calls as service:<DD_SERVICE>-grpc-client while Python tagged them as service:grpc-client. With this option enabled, all supported tracing libraries tag spans from the downstream services with the calling service’s name, service:<DD_SERVICE>, thereby providing a global default service name.

Similarly, for a span representing a call to a mySQL database:

Consequently, if you have existing:

• APM metrics
• APM custom span metrics
• Trace analytics
• Retention filters
• Sensitive data scans
• Monitors, dashboards, or notebooks

And these target similar service names, update those items to use the global default service tag (service:<DD_SERVICE>) instead.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Service ObservabilityDOCUMENTATION Sending Traces to DatadogDOCUMENTATION Add the Datadog Tracing LibraryDOCUMENTATION