End of Sale Notice:

F5 NGINX is announcing the End of Sale (EoS) for NGINX Controller API Management Module, effective January 1, 2024.

F5 maintains generous lifecycle policies that allow customers to continue support and receive product updates. Existing NGINX Controller API- Management customers can continue to use the product past the EoS date. License renewals are not available after September 30, 2024.

See our End of Sale announcement for more details.
End of Sale Notice:

F5 NGINX is announcing the End of Sale (EoS) for NGINX Controller Application Delivery Module, effective January 1, 2024.

F5 maintains generous lifecycle policies that allow customers to continue support and receive product updates. Existing NGINX Controller Application Delivery customers can continue to use the product past the EoS date. License renewals are not available after September 30, 2024.

See our End of Sale announcement for more details.

Forward Analytics Data to Datadog

How to forward Analytics data to Datadog.

Overview

Follow the steps in this guide to set up an F5 NGINX Controller Integration that forwards data to Datadog.

Before You Begin

This guide assumes that you are already an active Datadog user. If you haven’t already done so, you will need to install and configure Datadog before you proceed.

You will also need to Create an Integration for your Datadog forwarder.

Create a Forwarder

Take the following steps to create a Forwarder for Datadog:

  1. Open the NGINX Controller user interface and log in.
  2. Select the NGINX Controller menu icon, then select Platform.
  3. On the Platform menu, select Data Forwarders.
  4. On the Data Forwarders menu, select the Create Data Forwarder quick action.
  5. Add a name.
  6. (Optional) Add a display name.
  7. (Optional) Add a description.
  8. Select your Integration Reference from the dropdown menu or select Create New to create a new Integration.
  9. In the Collector Type list, select DATADOG.
  10. In the Source list, select the type of data to forward: metrics or events.
  11. In the Output Format list, select DATADOG.
  12. The Selector field consists of the following query parameters (optional):
  • names (inapplicable for EVENTS): The list of metrics names that you want to forward.
  • excluded_names (inapplicable for EVENTS): The list of metric names that you don’t want to forward.
  • filter: The conditions to use to refine the metrics or events data.
  • Example usage when selecting metrics: "names=nginx.*&excluded_names=nginx.upstream.*filter=app='myapp'"
  • Example usage when selecting events: "filter=type='security violation' AND app='my-app'"
  1. (Optional) Add additional Streams as required using the Add Stream button.
Important:

Each metric will be prefixed with a common namespace – such as “nginx-controller” – before it is sent to Datadog. This prefix is used by Datadog only and is not applied to any of the internal NGINX Controller metrics. Refer to the metrics catalog for the full list of valid metric names.

For events, the “nginx-controller” namespace is added to the “ddsource” key.

NGINX Controller events are sent to Datadog as logs and NGINX Controller dimensions are sent as tags. The Forwarder converts the dimension data to comply with the Datadog tags format prior to forwarding it. In some cases, the original dimension value may be transformed to fit the tag requirements. This includes replacing comma characters (,) with semicolons (;) to ensure that Datadog will properly handle the incoming payload.

See Also:
See the NGINX Controller Metrics docs for more information.

Verification

Soon after you create the Datadog forwarder, you can view the selected metrics in Datadog.

  1. Log into the Datadog web interface.
  2. On the navigation menu, select Metrics > Summary.

What’s Next