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Datadog Receiver

Status Available in: contrib Maintainers: @boostchicken, @MovieStoreGuy Source: opentelemetry-collector-contrib

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Supported Telemetry

Logs Metrics Traces

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Overview

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Configuration

Configuration wise is very simple, just need to specify where the Datadog receiver should listen and the read timeout. Then, the receiver must be configured in the pipeline where it will be used. The feature gate receiver.datadogreceiver.Enable128BitTraceID (enabled by default) makes the receiver reconstruct full 128-bit trace ids from spans coming from a datadog instrumented service, so they correlate with OpenTelemetry spans. Datadog splits a 128-bit trace id into a lower 64-bit part (TraceID) and an upper 64-bit part (_dd.p.tid); the receiver concatenates them. Disable the gate to fall back to 64-bit (zero-padded) trace ids.

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read_timeout (Optional)

The read timeout of the HTTP Server Default: 60s

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trace_id_cache_size (Optional)

The size of the LRU cache used to cache 64-bit trace ids and their matching 128-bit trace ids. This only has en effect when the feature gate receiver.datadogreceiver.Enable128BitTraceID is enabled. Default: 100

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idle_series_timeout (Optional)

The duration a specific series (metric name + unique tags) can be idle (not receive data) before being considered stale and removed from memory. This is useful to release memory in High Cardinality scenarios (e.g. ephemeral pods) where the number of series grows indefinitely. Recommendation: If enabled, ensure this value is significantly higher than the interval of your slowest emitting metric or cronjob. For example, if you have a job that runs every 30 minutes, set this to at least 60m to avoid resetting the start timestamp for those metrics. Default: 0s (Disabled - series are kept indefinitely)

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idle_series_cleanup_interval (Optional)

The duration between runs of the idle series cleanup task. This setting is only used when idle_series_timeout is enabled (greater than 0). The value must be a string with a unit (e.g. “5m”, ”60s”). Default: “5m”

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logs.decode_json_message (Optional)

When true, log records whose message is itself a JSON object are expanded, mirroring Datadog’s server-side “Preprocessing for JSON logs”. The Datadog Agent forwards an application’s JSON log as an opaque message string (JSON parsing normally happens in the Datadog backend), so without this the whole line becomes the log body. With it enabled, the inner reserved attributes take precedence over the agent envelope:
  • inner message → log body
  • status/level/severity → severity
  • timestamp/@timestamp/date → timestamp (the application’s emit time, overriding the agent’s collection time)
  • hostname/host → host.name, service → service.name
  • dd.trace_id/dd.span_id (decimal) → the record’s TraceID/SpanID, enabling trace-log correlation
  • remaining inner keys → log attributes (with Datadog→OTel key translation)
Default: true. Set to false to keep the raw JSON message as the log body.

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HTTP Service Config

All config params here are valid as well https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-collector/tree/main/config/confighttp#server-configuration

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/intake Config

The datadog-agent forwards metadata about its runtime environment via the /intake API endpoint. This receiver supports receiving this data and forwarding it directly to Datadog. (Note that this data isn’t telemetry data, so it does not go through any configured collector pipelines.) This feature can be enabled in the config:

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Metric Tag→Attribute Conversion

Datadog metric tags are expected to be in a key:value format. Tags not in this format will be given an unnamed_ prefix when added to the attribute map (e.g. the tag prod will be converted to unnamed_prod = prod). By default, multiple tags for the same data point with the same key: prefix will only have the last tag retained (e.g. ["env:a","env:b"] will be converted to {env = b}). If the receiver.datadogreceiver.EnableMultiTagParsing feature gate is enabled, multiple tags with the same key will instead be stored as a slice (e.g. ["env:a","env:b"] will be converted to {env = [a,b]}).

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Default Attributes

  • dd.span.Resource: The datadog resource name (as distinct from the span name)
  • datadog.metric.as_type: Set to rate on data points from a Datadog rate series, which is otherwise indistinguishable from a count series once translated to a delta Sum. The Datadog exporter reads it to map such a Sum back to a Datadog rate.

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Optional Attributes

  • _dd.span_links: This receiver supports DD Agent’s _dd.span_links attribute for span links creation, as produced by Datadog’s tracing libraries. Format example can be found here.

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Datadog’s API support

Traces Metrics Logs

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Temporality considerations

Some backends use a different timestamp temporality than Datadog uses. Both delta and cumulative temporalities are allowed in the spec. In order to store metrics on these backends, the receiver will need to translate the timestamps. For backends that use cumulative temporality, a delta to cumulative processor can be configured in the pipeline.
Last generated: 2026-08-24