Overview

Custom metrics help you track your application KPIs: number of visitors, average customer basket size, request latency, or performance distribution for a custom algorithm. A custom metric is identified by a unique combination of a metric’s name and tag values (including the host tag). In the example below, the metric request.Latency has four unique tag value combinations from its two tag keys:

• endpoint, which has the value endpoint:X or endpoint:Y.
• status, which has the value status:200 or status:400.

The following are also considered custom metrics:

• In general, any metric submitted through DogStatsD or through a custom Agent Check
• Metrics submitted by Marketplace integrations
• Certain standard integrations can potentially emit custom metrics
• Metrics submitted from an integration that is not one of the more than 800 Datadog integrations. Note: Marketplace integrations emit custom metrics.

Note: Users with the Datadog Admin role or usage_read permission can see the monthly average number of custom metrics per hour and the top 5000 custom metrics for their account in the usage details page. Learn more about how custom metrics are counted.

Custom metrics properties

A Datadog custom metric has the properties below. Read the metrics introduction to learn how to graph metrics within Datadog.

Naming custom metrics

The following custom metric naming convention must be followed:

• Metric names must start with a letter.
• Metric names must only contain ASCII alphanumerics, underscores, and periods.
  • Other characters, including spaces, are converted to underscores.
  • Unicode is not supported.
• Metric names must not exceed 200 characters. Fewer than 100 is preferred from a UI perspective.

Note: Metric names are case sensitive in Datadog.

Metric units

Set metric units through Metrics Summary or set custom metric units with the Unit override feature in the graph editor of your visualizations. For more information, see the Metrics Units documentation.

Submitting custom metrics

You can also use one of the Datadog official and community contributed API and DogStatsD client libraries to submit your custom metrics

Note: There are no enforced fixed rate limits on custom metric submission. If your default allotment is exceeded, you are billed according to Datadog’s billing policy for custom metrics.

Standard integrations

The following standard integrations can potentially emit custom metrics.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Learn more about DogStatsDDOCUMENTATION Official and Community created API and DogStatsD client librariesDOCUMENTATION Custom Metrics BillingDOCUMENTATION Best Practice for Custom Metric GovernanceGUIDE Dynamically control your custom metrics volume with Metrics without Limits™BLOG