Datadog DBM Quick Install for AWS RDS
September 26, 2025
Introduction
Datadog Database Monitoring (DBM) provides deep visibility into the performance of your entire database fleet, helping you quickly uncover issues, understand query behavior, and keep your databases running smoothly. By bringing all of your key database telemetry together in one place—including historical query performance, explain plans, and host-level metrics—DBM enables you to easily monitor and optimize your databases. DBM works seamlessly across self-hosted and managed versions of Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, MongoDB, and Amazon DocumentDB, and getting started is as simple as configuring your database and installing the Datadog Agent.
With Database Monitoring Quick Install for Amazon RDS, setting up monitoring for your RDS Postgres instances has never been easier. In just a few clicks, you can generate a CloudFormation template that automatically configures your RDS instances for monitoring and uses Amazon ECS to deploy the Datadog Agent with best-practice DBM settings. Quick Install removes the complexity of manual setup, so you can start monitoring your databases faster and with ease.
Explanation of the architecture
This reference architecture demonstrates how to deploy Datadog DBM on an Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL instance using RDS Quick Install. The deployment includes an Amazon ECS Fargate cluster that runs two containers: an ephemeral dbm-installer container to handle the initial configuration, and a persistent Datadog Agent container to continuously collect and forward metrics. This approach provides teams with a fast and streamlined way to enable DBM, eliminating the overhead of manually configuring RDS instances or managing the Datadog Agent life cycle.
Step 1
Datadog AWS Integration collects logs, events, and most metrics from CloudWatch for over 90 AWS services, including RDS. To quickly start using the AWS integration, check out our guide to getting started. Once the AWS integration is set up, Datadog collects the list of RDS instances by making read-only API calls to the AWS account.
Step 2
On the DBM home page, the Unmonitored Hosts tab lists all the RDS instances that are not currently monitored by DBM. Click on the Add Agent → button for the RDS instances that need to be monitored by DBM, and follow the installation steps.
Step 3
An ECS Fargate cluster will be installed for each account and region. Existing DBM-managed Fargate cluster will be used, if one exists already. Users will be prompted to provide a security group that allows incoming traffic to the database instance (from within the VPC) and egress traffic to 0.0.0.0/0. One ECS service will be provisioned that runs a task with two containers: dbm-installer and the Datadog Agent.
Step 4
Users will also be prompted to provide the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the admin credential of the RDS instance stored in AWS Secrets Manager. The dbm-installer container runs only during the service’s task start. It securely retrieves admin credentials from AWS Secrets Manager to log into the RDS instance, enables the pg_stat_statements extension, creates the explain_plan view in every logical database and creates a Datadog user with the required read-only privileges. Once setup is complete, the dbm-installer container exits with status 0.
Step 5
Next, the Datadog Agent container starts and runs perpetually. It authenticates to the AWS RDS instance as the Datadog user created in the previous step to collect query metrics, explain plans, and schema information. More details about the metrics collected and data retention periods can be found here. Since the ECS service is set as REPLICA, ECS ensures that at least one healthy agent task is always running, providing a highly available and resilient monitoring solution.
Step 6
The Agent obfuscates query parameters before sending data to Datadog DBM intake. This way, passwords, PII, and other sensitive information is never sent to Datadog. Optionally, the Agent can send data securely over a PrivateLink connection. You can use this guide to help you configure AWS PrivateLink for use with Datadog.
Roadmap
In future releases, DBM Quick Install will be extended to support additional database engines and configurations. Planned enhancements include compatibility with PostgreSQL read replicas, Amazon RDS Aurora, and other database management system (DBMS) flavors offered by AWS RDS, such as MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.
Authors
Rohit Reddy, Product Solutions Architect