Integrating Spring Boot with Datadog: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

Integrating Spring Boot with Datadog allows you to monitor and trace your Spring Boot applications easily. Datadog provides comprehensive monitoring, alerting, and tracing capabilities, giving you insights into your application’s performance and behavior. Below is a step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate Datadog with a Spring Boot application.

Step 1: Sign up for Datadog

If you don’t have a Datadog account, sign up for one at Datadog’s website. You’ll need the API key later for configuration.

Step 2: Create a Spring Boot Application

Create a new Spring Boot application using your preferred method (Spring Initializr, Maven, or Gradle). Include necessary dependencies like spring-boot-starter-web for a basic web application.

Step 3: Add Datadog Dependency

Include the Datadog Java APM (Application Performance Monitoring) dependency in your project. Update your pom.xml (if using Maven) or build.gradle (if using Gradle):

Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>datadog</groupId>
    <artifactId>dd-trace-api</artifactId>
    <version>0.74.0</version>
</dependency>

Gradle:

implementation 'datadog:dd-trace-api:0.74.0'

Step 4: Configure Datadog in your application

Create a datadog.properties file in the src/main/resources folder and add the following configuration:

# datadog.properties

# Replace YOUR_API_KEY with the API key obtained from Datadog
dd.api-key=YOURS-API-KEY

Step 5: Instrument Your Spring Boot Application

You need to instrument your Spring Boot application to enable Datadog APM. Add the following code to your main application class:

This code adds instrumentation using Datadog’s @Trace annotation. It starts and finishes a trace for the /api/hello endpoint.

Step 6: Run Your Application

Run your Spring Boot application, and make requests to your endpoints. Datadog will start collecting traces and metrics.

Step 7: Explore Datadog Dashboard

Go to the Datadog web interface and explore the dashboards. You should see traces, metrics, and other performance-related information for your Spring Boot application.