Skip to content

Instrument a Java container for Datadog

This guide shows you how to instrument Java applications running in Amazon ECS containers. OpenTelemetry Collector will be configured to collect the resulting logs, metrics, and traces.

Things to consider

Recommended practice

Enable auto-instrumentation to automatically capture useful telemetry from HTTP requests, database queries, external service calls, and application logs. You don't need to change any code in your app.

Before you begin

Make sure you have:

Step 1: Enable telemetry collection and auto-instrumentation

Auto-instrumentation automatically captures logs, metrics, and traces from your Java app. You don't need to change any code in your app.

  1. Update to the newest version of the app template for the application you want to instrument.

  2. Edit your package-config.yml file to enable telemetry collection:

    TelemetryCollection:
  Enable: true
  AutoInstrumentation:
    Enable: true # Disable this if you're already bundling the Java Agent with your application
    Runtime: java # This is the only supported runtime for auto-instrumentation

  3. Apply the configuration:

    ok pkg install

  4. Apply the Terraform configuration:

    terraform plan
terraform apply

Step 2: Add manual instrumentation (optional)

Auto-instrumentation provides basic telemetry, but custom business metrics need manual instrumentation with the OpenTelemetry SDK. Add the API dependency and use @WithSpan annotations or the API directly.

For detailed instructions on manual instrumentation, see the OpenTelemetry Java documentation.

Step 3: Verify instrumentation

Check Datadog for incoming traces, metrics, and logs. Use the env and service tags to filter the results. For example:

env:pirates-dev service:too-tikki`.

Next steps

With an instrumented application you can now: