Datadog APM Skill

Analyze distributed traces and service performance in Datadog APM.

Tools

| Tool | Description | |------|-------------| | search_traces | Search traces with query syntax and filters | | get_trace_details | Get detailed span information for a trace | | list_services | List all instrumented services | | get_service_summary | Get service health and performance summary |

Example Queries

Search for slow traces in the network service
→ search_traces(query="service:network-api @duration:>1s", time_range="1h")

Find error traces
→ search_traces(query="status:error", time_range="30m")

Get details of a specific trace
→ get_trace_details(trace_id="abc123def456")

List all services
→ list_services()

Get service performance summary
→ get_service_summary(service_name="network-api")

Workflows

Latency Analysis

1. Search slow traces: search_traces(query="@duration:>500ms")
2. Identify common patterns (resource, operation)
3. Drill into trace waterfall: get_trace_details(trace_id="...")
4. Find bottleneck spans
5. Compare with baseline performance

Error Investigation

1. Search error traces: search_traces(query="status:error service:network")
2. Group by error type and root cause
3. Review span-level errors in trace details
4. Correlate with recent deployments or changes

Service Health Review

1. List all services: list_services()
2. Get summary for critical services: get_service_summary(service_name="...")
3. Check error rate, latency percentiles, throughput
4. Identify degraded or unhealthy services
5. Review service dependencies map

Root Cause Analysis

1. Start from incident or alert
2. Find related traces: search_traces(query="trace_id:abc123")
3. Walk span tree to identify failure point
4. Check upstream/downstream service health
5. Correlate with infrastructure metrics

Prerequisites

• DD_API_KEY Datadog API key
• DD_APP_KEY Datadog application key
• DD_SITE Datadog site (optional, defaults to datadoghq.com)

Server

This skill uses the datadog-mcp server via remote MCP transport.

Notes

• APM requires instrumented services sending traces to Datadog
• Trace retention depends on your Datadog plan
• Large trace searches may be paginated