Datadog Service Catalog provides a consolidated view of your services, combining ownership metadata, performance insights, security analysis, cost allocation, and much more. Having this centralized hub allows your development teams to discover and manage critical components in your runtime environments.
This page walks you through getting started with Service Catalog in Datadog.
Service Catalog automatically discovers services based on application performance telemetries such as APM, USM, and RUM. The integration with APM enables Datadog to routinely discover new services at the same frequency as your traces are collected. With USM, the Datadog Agent connects to your eBPF-compatible hosts. USM automatically detects the services running on this infrastructure and tags them using unified service tagging.
User-defined services
If you are not using these products, you can manually declare services as entries in the service.definition.yaml registry. The definitions in this file include all the metadata that the catalog uses to file your services. These can be created and updated programmatically using an internal API or with a configuration management service like Terraform. You should include this file in your version control and regularly update it whenever new resources are added to your environment.
The following example represents a shopping-cart service from an e-commerce application. It includes important metadata about the service, such as its owning team, languages used, runbook link, and code repository.
You can also use any existing knowledge sources your organization maintains, such as Configuration Management Database (CMDB) tables (through Datadog’s ServiceNow integration) and spreadsheets, to populate your Service Catalog. Datadog also has an integration with Backstage that allows you to import any data or services registered here into Datadog directly.
Finally, you can also create entries from service tags in other Datadog products like Infrastructure Monitoring and Log Management.
Managing metadata in Service Catalog
After you create these initial entries in your Service Catalog, it is important to keep the catalog updated consistently so that it remains effective. Service definition files should exist within your team’s version control to make it easier to reference new deployments and other changes to the services where an update may be required.
You can also automate the management of your service metadata by configuring a GitHub action. This will also allow you to ensure that teams are declaring services in a way that meets your standards, such as requiring all of your production services to have valid runbook links.
If your organization has an existing registry of ownership, including internal systems like Backstage or a spreadsheet, a central team can schedule updates to service definition files using API calls.
Connect telemetry from across your monitoring stack
Connect monitoring data from the rest of your observability platform to improve the utility of your catalog.
With unified service tagging, you can use the service tag to cross-reference service entities in the Service Catalog across all Datadog products. These tags can help enrich your service entities with metadata, metrics, and other context sources like Infrastructure Monitoring, RUM, Log Management, Software Delivery, and Security.
Application performance telemetry from Universal Service Monitoring and APM also provide out-of-the-box dependency mapping for your system ecosystem, so you can see how components interact with each other in all your runtime environments.
Enriching your Service Catalog
After services are populated in the catalog, you can enrich your service definitions with additional context to make them more useful. This could include adding key pieces of service metadata to your service.definition.yaml files such as:
Team
On-call engineer
Contact channel
Documentation links
Last deployed version
Code repositories
Runbook links
Library dependencies and their versions
Relevant dashboards
Service Catalog uses service definition schemas to store and display this metadata about your services. The schemas have built-in validation rules to ensure that only valid values are accepted. There are currently four supported schemas: v2, v2.1, v2.2, and v3.
Using Service Catalog Scorecards
Service Scorecards help you codify your organization’s best practices as rules that can be evaluated. By implementing scorecards in your catalog, your teams can measure many dimensions of service quality, including:
Monitoring coverage
Production readiness
Security posture
Adoption of the latest internal tooling
Integration checks
Datadog Scorecards include 10 out-of-the-box rules across observability practices, ownership tagging, and production readiness checkpoints. You can also define your own custom rules. For example, you could create a scorecard that contains a set of rules that map to the steps in your security review process, so that you can quickly audit whether each of your services is compliant. These rules might include checks related to CVE analysis, RBAC configuration, or other security parameters.
To add custom rules to your Scorecards dashboard:
Click Create Rule on the Scorecards page.
Specify the name of the rule, the scorecard it belongs to, a rule description, and the owning team.
Send an outcome of pass, fail, or skip for each {rule, service} tuple that you are evaluating to the Scorecards API/scorecard/outcomes/batch endpoint.
View an overview of outcomes in the Scorecards dashboard.
Further reading
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
