NerdVision releases on the Datadog Marketplace

Ben

January 20, 2021

NerdVision allows you to take a snapshot of your application state, including the stack and variables at runtime, giving you a high degree of visibility without having to make changes to source code, block the end user experience or introduce overhead. With the new NerdVision Datadog integration, you can see metrics related to the NerdVision generated events and log messages to get true transparency into hot spots.

Datadog is a SaaS-based monitoring and security platform for cloud-scale infrastructure, applications, logs, and more. Datadog delivers complete visibility into the performance of modern applications in one place through its fully unified platform—which improves cross-team collaboration, accelerates development cycles, and reduces operational and development costs.

Together Datadog and NerdVision allow you to gather and analyse your applications quickly and at any scale.

NerdVision dashboard in Datadog


Inject logs and send directly to Datadog

With the new NerdVision Datadog integration, you can now inject logging directly into your application as well as send and view those logs in Datadog. A log point can be applied to any line with just one click and is highly configurable with rate limits, conditions, and expressions to evaluate inside the log message itself. This gives the flexibility to log what an application is doing at any time, without the need to restart or make code changes to the application.

Dynamic log in NerdVision

Analyse with Datadog Logs

Once the data is available in Datadog you can analyse the data gathered by NerdVision. Search the logs by host, location and other tag data and correlate the results with other events to gain deeper insight into your application. Use Log Patterns to aggregate log messages together into groups of similar messages, making it easier to find frequent or recurring issues. Incorporate monitors to get notified when known patterns appear.

Find problem services

With the analytic tools from Datadog, you are able to see where your engineering teams are spending their time and isolate services or areas of code that could use attention. Using the tags in NerdVision and the Log facets in Datadog, we can provide a clear picture of the areas where developers are having to spend their time to solve problems. We are able to provide a breakdown of the code locations, hostnames and repositories where tracepoints are being triggered. This can be used to identify areas where developers are struggling with bugs, giving insight to areas of technical dept that could benefit from refactoring.

Setting up NerdVision with Datadog

This integration is a two-part integration that combines the data gathering functionality of NerdVision with the visualisations, deep dive and connections in Datadog.

Configure NerdVision

In order to use the NerdVision integration with Datadog you need to have a configured NerdVision account and have connected your application to NerdVision. For full details on how to do this please see our documentation or the Datadog Marketplace tile.

Configure Datadog

Once you have created a NerdVision account, head over to Datadog and install the NerdVision integration from the Marketplace, following the marketplace instructions. 


Direct link to install the NerdVision integration, please pay attention to your Datadog region. 


USA Datadog region: https://app.datadoghq.com/marketplace/app/nerdvision/overview

European Datadog region: https://app.datadoghq.eu/marketplace/app/nerdvision/overview


Once the configuration is complete you will start to see metrics from NerdVision appear in Datadog; including:

  • Online Clients
  • Function invocations
  • Log messages
  • Tracepoint triggers
Ben

Ben

Experienced developer in various languages, currently a product owner of nerd.vision leading the back end architecture.