Datadog Fundamentals study guide
Datadog Fundamentals · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Datadog Fundamentals credential is an entry-level certification that validates a working knowledge of the Datadog platform - how its products fit together and how telemetry from infrastructure, applications, logs, front-end experiences, and security signals is collected, explored, and acted on. Datadog publishes a dedicated Fundamentals Certification Learning Path in its Learning Center, described there as a 16-course path whose courses cover the topics in the Datadog Fundamentals Certification exam, so the vendor's own curriculum is the natural backbone for preparation. The Datadog Fundamentals study guide has 6 sections and about 1,902 words.
01Infrastructure Monitoring
The Datadog Agent (v7) is a host-level daemon that collects system metrics, runs integration checks under /etc/datadog-agent/conf.d/ , and forwards metrics, logs, and traces to the platform. Metrics reach Datadog either through the Agent (including DogStatsD for custom metrics) or directly through the HTTP API.
351 words, about 2 min02Application Performance Monitoring
APM builds distributed traces from spans. A trace is a tree of spans; the first span is the entry point, and each downstream call adds a child span with its own duration.
320 words, about 2 min03Log Management
Logs flow: ingest → processing pipelines → indexes → archives. Pipelines are ordered and contain processors: Grok parser, date rematcher, status rematcher, service remapper, category processor, lookup processor, arithmetic processor, and attribute remapper.
308 words, about 2 min04Digital Experience Monitoring
Synthetic tests simulate traffic: API tests (HTTP, SSL, DNS, gRPC, WebSocket, TCP, UDP, ICMP), multistep API tests that chain requests with variables and assertions, and browser tests that run real Chrome sessions through steps and assertions. Tests run from managed global locations or from private locations you host yourself as a container.
319 words, about 2 min05Security
Datadog security splits into products that are easy to mix up. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM, part of CSM Misconfigurations) evaluates cloud resources and hosts against compliance rules; it leans on cloud integrations and can be agentless.
311 words, about 2 min06Service Management and Platform Capabilities
Service Catalog registers services with ownership, metadata, and links to dashboards, monitors, and runbooks; Service Ownership maps those services to Teams. Software Delivery (CI Visibility and DORA metrics) measures deployment frequency, lead time, change failure rate, and time to restore from CI pipelines and deployments.
293 words, about 1 min