dd-monitors

SKILL.md

Datadog Monitors

Create, manage, and maintain monitors for alerting.

Prerequisites

This requires pup in your path. See Setup Pup.

Command Execution Order (Token-Efficient)

For scoped commands, use this order:

Check context first (prior outputs, conversation, saved values).

If a required value is missing, run a discovery command first.

If still ambiguous, ask the user to confirm.

Then run the target command.

Avoid speculative commands likely to fail.

Quick Start

pup auth login

Common Operations

List Monitors

pup monitors list
pup monitors list --tags "team:platform"

Get Monitor

pup monitors get <id>

Create Monitor

pup monitors create --file monitor.json

Silence Alerts (Downtime)

# No pup monitors mute/unmute commands.
# Use downtime payloads to silence monitor notifications.
pup downtime create --file downtime.json
pup downtime cancel <downtime_id>

⚠️ Monitor Creation Best Practices

1. Avoid Alert Fatigue

Rule
Why

No flapping alerts
Use last_Xm not last_1m

Meaningful thresholds
Based on SLOs, not guesses

Actionable alerts
If no action needed, don't alert

Include runbook
@runbook-url in message

# WRONG - will flap constantly
query = "avg(last_1m):avg:system.cpu.user{*} > 50"  # ❌ Too sensitive

# CORRECT - stable alerting
query = "avg(last_5m):avg:system.cpu.user{env:prod} by {host} > 80"  # ✅ Reasonable window

2. Use Proper Scoping

# WRONG - alerts on everything
query = "avg(last_5m):avg:system.cpu.user{*} > 80"  # ❌ No scope

# CORRECT - scoped to what matters
query = "avg(last_5m):avg:system.cpu.user{env:prod,service:api} by {host} > 80"  # ✅

3. Set Recovery Thresholds

monitor = {
    "query": "avg(last_5m):avg:system.cpu.user{env:prod} > 80",
    "options": {
        "thresholds": {
            "critical": 80,
            "critical_recovery": 70,  # ✅ Prevents flapping
            "warning": 60,
            "warning_recovery": 50
        }
    }
}

4. Include Context in Messages

message = """
## High CPU Alert

Host: {{host.name}}
Current Value: {{value}}
Threshold: {{threshold}}

### Runbook
1. Check top processes: `ssh {{host.name}} 'top -bn1 | head -20'`
2. Check recent deploys
3. Scale if needed

@slack-ops @pagerduty-oncall
"""

⚠️ NEVER Delete Monitors Directly

Use safe deletion workflow (same as dashboards):

def safe_mark_monitor_for_deletion(monitor_id: str, client) -> bool:
    """Mark monitor instead of deleting."""
    monitor = client.get_monitor(monitor_id)
    name = monitor.get("name", "")
    
    if "[MARKED FOR DELETION]" in name:
        print(f"Already marked: {name}")
        return False
    
    new_name = f"[MARKED FOR DELETION] {name}"
    client.update_monitor(monitor_id, {"name": new_name})
    print(f"✓ Marked: {new_name}")
    return True

Monitor Types

Type
Use Case

metric alert
CPU, memory, custom metrics

query alert
Complex metric queries

service check
Agent check status

event alert
Event stream patterns

log alert
Log pattern matching

composite
Combine multiple monitors

apm
APM metrics

Audit Monitors

# Find monitors without owners
pup monitors list | jq '.[] | select(.tags | contains(["team:"]) | not) | {id, name}'

# Find noisy monitors (high alert count)
pup monitors list | jq 'sort_by(.overall_state_modified) | .[:10] | .[] | {id, name, status: .overall_state}'

Downtime vs Muting

Use
When

Downtime
Any planned silence window

Monitor edit
Query/threshold behavior changes

# Downtime (preferred)
pup downtime create --file downtime.json

Failure Handling

Problem
Fix

Alert not firing
Check query returns data, thresholds

Too many alerts
Increase window, add recovery threshold

No data alerts
Check agent connectivity, metric exists

Auth error
pup auth refresh

References

Monitor Types

Alerting Best Practices

SLO Monitors