Teams can gain deep visibility into their applications and infrastructure by installing Datadog’s client-side agent software—the Datadog Agent—throughout their environment. And to help ensure the Agent is deployed correctly and consistently, Datadog’s Fleet Automation feature already helps teams centrally view Agent installations and configurations. But teams also need an easier way to manage the deployment and configuration of the Agent at scale.
We’re pleased to announce that Fleet Automation now elevates Datadog Agent management not only by centralizing visibility into Agent deployments and configurations, but also by enabling teams to perform administrative actions centrally from within the Datadog platform. With Fleet Automation, teams can now securely and remotely manage Agent software upgrades, enforce configuration standards, and ensure that Agent deployments are consistent across their environments. These new Fleet Automation features move beyond providing visibility by empowering teams to scale upgrades and easily configure the Agent across the entirety of their infrastructure.
In this blog post, we will discuss how Datadog Fleet Automation allows teams to centrally manage upgrades for and apply configurations to their entire fleet of Agents.
Easily perform Agent software upgrades across your infrastructure
Fleet Automation’s new Upgrades tab, shown below, provides a simple solution for keeping the Agent software current and compliant across all your environments. By centralizing Agent upgrades, Fleet Automation helps you deploy the most recent Agent version with latest features throughout your infrastructure and maintain a strong security posture with the latest security patches.
Combined with Fleet Automation’s ability to provide centralized visibility into the status of Agent upgrades, this ability to upgrade the Agent at scale allows central teams to both deploy the Agent and immediately verify the success of that deployment. It also improves operational efficiency by removing the need to delegate and coordinate this responsibility across teams, and by unifying deployment of the Agent across all operating systems within a single tool.
Enable Agent configurations and product features at scale
Through its new Agent policy feature, Fleet Automation goes beyond merely identifying configuration issues. Admins can now proactively manage Agent configurations to ensure a consistent setup for all Datadog Agents that fall within the scope of a defined policy. Additionally, because the Datadog Agent’s configuration enables product features, Fleet Automation policies allow you to enable Datadog products and capabilties—such as Cloud Security Management, Network Performance Monitoring, and Live Processes—at scale.
To make it easy to create new policies or modify existing ones, Fleet Automation provides guided workflows. Thanks to these workflows, instead of needing to configure the datadog.yaml file, engineers can now configure hosts across any portion of their infrastructure through the Datadog UI, without needing to access any hosts directly. The simplicity of creating and applying new policies through workflows also makes it easier for teams to push out configurations to either a small number of Agents to test new Datadog features or to the entire fleet of Agents to ensure consistency in observability coverage.
Manage Agent upgrades and configurations at scale
By allowing you to perform Agent upgrades and use policies to apply Agent configurations, Datadog Fleet Automation’s capabilities now offer centralized management and configuration of Agent fleets in addition to centralized visibility. Fleet Automation is a core feature of the Datadog platform and is available to all customers at no extra cost. To learn more about how to get started using Fleet Automation, see our documentation. To start managing Agent upgrades in Fleet Automation, sign up for the Upgrade Agent Preview here. To start applying Agent configuration policies, sign up for the Agent Configuration Preview here. And if you’re not yet a Datadog customer, sign up for a 14-day free trial to get started.
