Datadog exporter
Datadog receives both traces and metrics from the Alokai collector. Traces appear in APM & Services → Distributed Tracing; metrics appear in Metrics Explorer and can be used in dashboards and monitors.
What you need
- Datadog API key — see Creating an API key below.
- Datadog site — the regional domain for your Datadog account. See identifying your site below.
Creating an API key
Datadog API keys are not scoped — any API key grants full ingest access. You only need to create one and keep it secret.
- In Datadog, go to Organization Settings → API Keys (or open this link directly).
- Click New Key.
- Enter a name — something descriptive like
alokai-cloud-otel. - Click Create API Key.
- Copy the key immediately — it is only shown once.
Store the key securely. If lost, you will need to create a new one and update the Console.
Configuring in the Console
In the Console, navigate to your instance's observability settings and enable the Datadog integration. You will be asked to provide:
- API key
- Site
- Which signals to enable: Traces, Metrics, or both
The collector is deployed automatically once you save. No restart of your application is required.
Datadog site
Datadog operates multiple independent sites. The site determines which regional infrastructure your data is sent to. Every Datadog account belongs to exactly one site. Using the wrong site will result in authentication failures and your data will not appear in your account.
| Site name | Domain | Region |
|---|---|---|
| US1 | datadoghq.com | United States |
| US3 | us3.datadoghq.com | United States |
| US5 | us5.datadoghq.com | United States |
| EU1 | datadoghq.eu | Germany |
| AP1 | ap1.datadoghq.com | Japan |
| AP2 | ap2.datadoghq.com | Australia |
| US1-FED | ddog-gov.com | United States (Government) |
To find your site: click your profile avatar in the lower-left corner of Datadog, select My Preferences, and look for the site URL listed next to your organisation name. Alternatively, look at the domain in your browser's address bar when logged in.
APM
Datadog APM gives you service maps, request throughput, error rates, and latency percentiles derived automatically from your traces. APM metrics are computed by the collector from span data — you do not need to emit separate metrics for request rates or error rates.
When enabling APM in the Console, both the Traces and APM exporters must be turned on. APM metrics are computed from trace data and are independent of the general Metrics exporter.
Required resource attributes
For traces to appear correctly in APM and for Unified Service Tagging to work, your application must set the following OTel resource attributes via environment variables:
| OTel attribute | Datadog tag | Notes |
|---|---|---|
service.name | service | Required. Defaults to alokai-cloud if not set. |
deployment.environment | env | Required. Defaults to the instance environment type if not set. |
service.version | version | Recommended. Enables version comparison in the APM Deployments view. |
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=storefront
OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES=deployment.environment=production,service.version=1.4.2
All three tags are required for full Unified Service Tagging. Missing any one of them results in incomplete correlation between APM, infrastructure metrics, and dashboards.
Using dd-trace
Do not use the dd-trace library alongside the OTel SDK. dd-trace targets the Datadog Agent sidecar, which is a separate, legacy integration. When using the Alokai OTel integration, instrument your application exclusively with the OTel SDK.
Collector health metrics
You can monitor the health of the OTel collector pipeline from the Metric Explorer in the Alokai Console. It shows spans collected by the collector and spans successfully sent or failed to be sent to Datadog — useful for verifying that telemetry is flowing end-to-end without needing to open Datadog.