What is datadog-agent?

This is the main source code repository for the Datadog Agent, a piece of software that runs on your servers or cloud infrastructure and collects data about what is happening there. It gathers metrics (numbers like CPU usage, memory consumption, and request counts), logs (text records of events), and distributed traces (records of how requests flow through different parts of an application). All of that information gets sent to Datadog, a monitoring platform, where teams can view dashboards, set up alerts, and investigate problems. The repository covers Agent versions 6 and 7, which are the current major versions. An older version 5 existed previously with a different architecture, and the official documentation explains what changed across those versions if you need to compare them. For teams using Datadog today, they typically install the Agent using pre-built packages that Datadog provides for common operating systems, rather than building it from this source code themselves. This repository is primarily useful for Datadog's own engineers and open-source contributors who want to understand or modify how the Agent works. The Agent is written in Go, a programming language commonly used for infrastructure tooling because it compiles to fast, self-contained binaries. Some lower-level components use a Linux kernel technology called eBPF, which allows the Agent to observe system activity at a deep level without much overhead. Those components are covered by a different open-source license than the rest of the code. If you are evaluating Datadog or trying to get it running on your infrastructure, the right starting point is Datadog's user-facing documentation rather than this repository, which is focused on how the Agent is developed internally.