--- title: "Match monitoring depth to workload needs with Infrastructure Basic" description: "Monitor host health and resource usage across lower-priority workloads with the lightweight Infrastructure Basic tier from Datadog." author: "Ryan Willis, April Yep" date: 2026-10-28 tags: ["infrastructure monitoring", "devops"] blog_type_id: the-monitor locale: en --- A back-office server that runs out of disk space can interrupt an important internal workflow. A process that stops on a staging host can delay development. Although workloads like these might not require application-level instrumentation, teams still need to know when the hosts that support them require attention. Without a monitoring solution tailored to these requirements, teams have to apply more monitoring than the workload needs, maintain a separate tool, or accept a gap in visibility. [Datadog Infrastructure Basic](https://docs.datadoghq.com/agent/configuration/infrastructure-modes.md?tab=linux#basic) provides lightweight monitoring for workloads that have lower observability requirements. It collects core system metrics and information about selected processes, enabling teams to bring monitoring for these workloads into Datadog without deploying a separate monitoring solution. In this post, we'll explain how you can use Infrastructure Basic to: - [Establish baseline visibility for noncritical workloads](#establish-baseline-visibility-for-noncritical-workloads) - [Consolidate monitoring across workloads with different needs](#consolidate-monitoring-across-workloads-with-different-needs) ## Establish baseline visibility for noncritical workloads Noncritical workloads still raise important operational questions. Is a host up and reachable? Is it healthy or approaching a resource limit? Are the processes that the workload depends on still running? Infrastructure Basic provides the system-level data you need to answer those questions. Infrastructure Basic collects core system metrics for CPU, memory, disk utilization and I/O, network activity, uptime, and system load. You can also configure the [Process Check](https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/process.md) to monitor selected named processes. ![Datadog infrastructure dashboard displaying a host summary along with CPU, process memory usage, and load averages for a Basic host.](https://web-assets.dd-static.net/42588/1792787611-infrastructure-monitoring-basic-host-summary.png) Out-of-the-box dashboards in Infrastructure Basic help you track host health and resource utilization. You can also [create monitors](https://docs.datadoghq.com/getting_started/monitors.md#create-a-monitor) for conditions such as high CPU utilization, low available disk space, or a selected process that has stopped running. Full-resolution data remains available for 15 months, providing historical context to help you investigate resource changes and recurring problems. Infrastructure Basic also supports SaaS integrations. Through these integrations, teams can connect monitors for Basic hosts to the notification and incident management tools that they already use. For example, when a monitor’s alert conditions are met, Datadog can create a [ServiceNow](https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/servicenow.md?tab=itomitsmintegration) ticket or trigger a [PagerDuty](https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/pagerduty.md) incident. ## Consolidate monitoring across workloads with different needs Infrastructure Basic helps teams consolidate monitoring for workloads with different observability requirements in Datadog. You can use Infrastructure Basic and one other Infrastructure Monitoring tier (Pro or Enterprise) within the same [Datadog organization](https://docs.datadoghq.com/account_management/organization_topology.md) to address your varying needs. Teams can query supported system metrics across hosts on both tiers and display the results in the same dashboards, helping them correlate host health and resource usage across workloads in a single platform. Infrastructure Basic is designed for workloads whose primary monitoring requirements are host availability, core resource utilization, and the status of selected processes. Workloads that require container monitoring, technology-specific integrations through the [Datadog Agent](https://docs.datadoghq.com/agent.md), broader process visibility, or application-level context should use other Infrastructure Monitoring tiers. For example, you might run critical applications in the cloud while maintaining development VMs, physical servers, and legacy applications on premises. Troubleshooting the cloud applications can require you to correlate infrastructure health with telemetry data from containers, services, and dependencies. However, some of the on-premises systems might need only baseline host visibility. For hosts that need only baseline visibility, Infrastructure Basic uses the same Datadog Agent as other host-based Infrastructure Monitoring tiers. When configured in `basic` mode, the Agent limits collection to the system-level data supported by Infrastructure Basic. ## Get started with Datadog Infrastructure Basic Infrastructure Basic provides baseline host visibility for workloads that need system health and resource monitoring without the deeper instrumentation required by critical applications. Teams can bring noncritical hosts into the same Datadog environment as their more deeply monitored systems, reducing gaps that arise when secondary workloads are unmonitored or live in separate monitoring products. If you’re interested in using Infrastructure Basic, contact your Datadog account team. To learn more, read the [Agent infrastructure modes documentation](https://docs.datadoghq.com/agent/configuration/infrastructure-modes.md?tab=linux) and the [Infrastructure Monitoring pricing page](https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/?product=infrastructure-monitoring#products). If you don't already have a Datadog account, you can .