Jace Harker
Colten Woo
Modern cloud environments are highly complex and dynamic, with critical services relying on large numbers of ephemeral resources. Ensuring observability coverage across this landscape is essential for troubleshooting, maintaining reliability, optimizing performance, and enforcing security standards. But as environments grow more elaborate and their ownership more dispersed, tracking observability coverage becomes increasingly challenging.
With the Observability overlay in Cloudcraft, you can now visually spot where critical observability is missing in your environment. Whether you're looking for hosts without the Datadog Agent installed, hosts with outdated Agent versions, or coverage gaps for Datadog products like Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Log Management, or Cloud Network Monitoring (CNM), the overlay helps you detect and resolve these blind spots directly from your architecture diagrams. The overlay also makes it easy for you to pivot to Datadog Fleet Automation to take action, directly from the Datadog platform.
View Agent coverage across your environment
Installing the Agent on the hosts in your environment dramatically improves observability. Although you may already monitor hosts through integrations with cloud providers, installing the Agent on those hosts enables you to collect metrics at higher sampling rates, capture and store telemetry data with higher granularity, and automatically enrich that data via unified service tagging.
To find hosts lacking an installation of the Agent, you can use the Observability overlay in Cloudcraft, which visually identifies these hosts with a gray pin. From there, you can pivot to step-by-step instructions for installing the Agent on those hosts according to your desired configuration, via your preferred deployment tooling.
You may also want to identify any hosts with out-of-date Agent versions to update that software and provide those hosts with the latest Agent features and security patches. When you view Datadog coverage by Agent version in Cloudcraft, hosts where the Agent is installed but out-of-date are marked with an orange pin and labeled with the installed Agent version. By clicking on the pin or on a group, you can—via a side panel—take action either on a single host, or on all the hosts in a group (such as hosts that share an account, region, VPC, security group, subnet, or other tag), or on multiple hosts of your choice. This is possible thanks to direct links to Fleet Automation, which enables you to upgrade the Agent in just two steps—helping you ensure that your Agent software is current and compliant. If you need more information before making the change, the side panel also provides detailed information about Agent configurations, connected integrations, and audit events. Additionally, the side panel provides a support tab that enables you to send a remote flare.
Visually identify where product features are and are not enabled
With Cloudcraft, you can also surface information about which hosts do or don't have available Datadog products and features enabled. As displayed on the legend on the left side of the screenshot below, these products and features can include APM, Log Management (shown as “Logs”), and Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM). Through this legend, you can easily view how many hosts have the selected feature enabled compared to the total number of hosts in the view. To help you find which specific hosts don't have a feature enabled, you can select that feature in the legend, after which Cloudcraft indicates missing coverage with an orange pin. From here, you can quickly take action through a side panel.
And as with deploying the Agent, you can select either a single resource or multiple resources before pivoting into Fleet Automation to deploy a configuration that enables your desired feature. After navigating to Fleet Automation, you'll be prompted to choose which configuration you want to deploy and the deployment scope, with fields pre-populated based on the hosts you have selected in Cloudcraft.
Close observability gaps with Cloudcraft in Datadog
By using Cloudcraft together with Fleet Automation, you can identify and address gaps in observability coverage visually and at scale, helping you ensure consistent and comprehensive coverage across your infrastructure. Both Cloudcraft and Fleet Automation are core features of the Datadog platform and are available at no extra cost.
To learn more about how to get started using the Observability overlay in Cloudcraft, see our documentation. And if you're not yet a Datadog customer, sign up for a 14-day free trial to get started.
