Automate actions from Datadog observability data

In a digital business world, your applications drive results for both internal employees and external audiences such as customers, partners and suppliers. All of this depends on a resilient, reliable technology stack and as a result observability practices have arisen to provide real-time intelligence about what is happening in essential digital application environments. 

What if you could take action from this intelligence to quickly resolve alerts quickly before they result in an outage, threat or slow down in the application? Better yet, what if you could also specify the type of alert you want to respond to and the action you would like to be taken? The good news is you can do this today with Event-Driven Ansible, part of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. 

How does Event-Driven Ansible work?

Event-Driven Ansible works with event sources such as observability tools, monitoring tools, open source tools like Kafka and Prometheus alertmanager and others to enable you to take specific action from specific data or intelligence about current conditions. This can enable fast responses to limit or avoid outages, quick restore of expired certificates, gather troubleshooting information, respond to limits and thresholds automatically, respond to security concerns, address drift as soon as it occurs and much more. 

With so many tools available, such as observability solutions from Datadog, you can create a custom webhook or event source plugin–or even feed your alerts into a Kafka topic. From there, you can create Ansible Rulebooks which allow automated responses to your alerts. Rulebooks can be written in the same familiar YAML that you use today to create Ansible Playbooks, but they are conditional – when specific conditions are met based on an alert, they can automatically take action. This includes calling Ansible modules or even existing Ansible Playbooks that you have come to trust. So let’s say you have a certificate that expires at 2 a.m. – everyone remains asleep and Event-Driven Ansible along with Datadog can be used to renew that certificate and simply notify you of the occurrence in your ITSM solution.

What other ways can I work with Datadog alerts?

Datadog is a comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale applications. It provides real-time insights into the performance of applications, infrastructure and services, enabling businesses to detect and resolve issues swiftly. Datadog's features include:

• Infrastructure monitoring: Real-time visibility into servers, databases and cloud services.
• Application performance monitoring: Deep insights into application performance and user experience.
• Network performance monitoring: Monitoring of network traffic and performance.
• Security monitoring: Detection of security threats and vulnerabilities.

Based on these capabilities in Datadog, you can create automated event-driven responses that help you deliver applications and services with speed and resilience. For example:

• Infrastructure monitoring: Provision a new cloud instance or server resource in a self-service model for faster response to needs, or reapply a standard configuration if there is drift, while tracking the changes in your ITSM. 
• Application performance monitoring: Receive an alert when there is application latency and create a service ticket to investigate, or automatically increase cloud instance sizes and create a notification that this has occurred. 
• Network performance: Respond to issues and outages in one area of the network, redirecting traffic to another, or respond to a DNS issue by automatically collecting configuration data and attaching it to a service ticket for faster resolution.
• Security monitoring: Immediately shut down a firewall where there is suspicious activity and create a notification for investigation, or respond to an alert that there has been drift in an essential security setting. 

So what’s the benefit?

There are many benefits and they can be flexibly set up to help you meet goals that are most important to you. This includes:

• Fast, accurate and consistent incident response.
• Better management of configurations for advantages like lower risk and more consistency and control in your environment.
• More scalability when you automatically respond to thresholds and limits.
• Improved efficiency with less manual work and more time for true priorities – in addition to sleeping more, hopefully.
• Cost savings, flexibility and ability to address skills gaps.

And much more!

How can you learn more about using Datadog with Event-Driven Ansible?

There are a few things you can do:

• Learn Event-Driven Ansible by taking these online labs.
• Watch this video that explains an event-driven automation for a golf application.
• See us at booth # 21 at the upcoming Datadog DASH event June 25-26, 2024 in New York. Learn more about our presence at this event here. You can also catch an Event-Driven Ansible and Datadog session on June 25 at 2:30 p.m. in the Observability Theatre. 
• Check out the Event-Driven Ansible web page to learn more details and read about customer successes with Event-Driven Ansible.
• Check out this blog on creating custom event-source plugins or web hooks. 
• Check out the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for Datadog for Ansible Automation Platform.