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Increase metrics limit setting for Datadog

Monitoring services and applications are essential to know whether programs work as expected. To get started with monitoring, see Aiven and Datadog integration.

Sometimes, you cannot find the metrics you expected, or some values are missing on dashboards for large service clusters. You can overcome this limitation and get more metrics from the integration.

Identify that metrics have been dropped​

The following is an example log of a large Apache Kafka® service cluster where some metrics are missing and cannot be found in the Datadog dashboards after service integration. These metrics have been dropped by user Telegraf.

2022-02-15T22:47:30.601220+0000 scoober-kafka-3c1132a3-82 user-telegraf: 2022-02-15T22:47:30Z W! [outputs.prometheus_client] Metric buffer overflow; 3378 metrics have been dropped
2022-02-15T22:47:30.625696+0000 scoober-kafka-3c1132a3-86 user-telegraf: 2022-02-15T22:47:30Z W! [outputs.prometheus_client] Metric buffer overflow; 1197 metrics have been dropped

Configure the maximum metric limit​

You can set the maximum metric limit for services in the Datadog integration configuration, where the Datadog agents gather metrics via JMX using the max_jmx_metrics option. The value of this metric can be set to any value between 10 and 100000. The default value is 2000.

note

Datadog may also limit the number of custom metrics that can be received, based on your pricing plan .

The max_jmx_metrics is not exposed in the Aiven Console yet, but you can change the value for it from the Aiven CLI using the following procedure:

  1. Find the SERVICE_INTEGRATION_ID for your Datadog integration with

    avn service integration-list --project=PROJECT_NAME SERVICE_NAME

  2. Change the value of max_jmx_metrics to the new LIMIT:

    avn service integration-update SERVICE_INTEGRATION_ID --project PROJECT_NAME -c max_jmx_metrics=LIMIT
note

We recommend you gradually increase the value and monitor the memory usage on the cluster.