Setting Up Database Monitoring for self-hosted SQL Server

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Database Monitoring provides deep visibility into your Microsoft SQL Server databases by exposing query metrics, query samples, explain plans, database states, failovers, and events.

Do the following steps to enable Database Monitoring with your database:

Before you begin

Supported SQL Server versions: 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2022, 2025 (requires Agent 7.79+)
Supported Agent versions: 7.41.0+
Performance impact: The default Agent configuration for Database Monitoring is conservative, but you can adjust settings such as the collection interval and query sampling rate to better suit your needs. For most workloads, the Agent represents less than one percent of query execution time on the database and less than one percent of CPU.

Database Monitoring runs as an integration on top of the base Agent (see benchmarks).
Proxies, load balancers, and connection poolers: The Datadog Agent must connect directly to the host being monitored. The Agent should not connect to the database through a proxy, load balancer, or connection pooler. If the Agent connects to different hosts while it is running (as in the case of failover, load balancing, and so on), the Agent calculates the difference in statistics between two hosts, producing inaccurate metrics.
Data security considerations: Read about how Database Management handles sensitive information for information about what data the Agent collects from your databases and how to ensure it is secure.
RDS Custom: Datadog supports DBM for some RDS Custom configurations that make OS-level changes. This support depends on the customizations stable compatibility with DBM.

Grant the Agent access

The Datadog Agent requires read-only access to the database server in order to collect statistics and queries.

Create a read-only login to connect to your server and grant the required permissions:

CREATELOGINdatadogWITHPASSWORD='<PASSWORD>';CREATEUSERdatadogFORLOGINdatadog;GRANTCONNECTANYDATABASEtodatadog;GRANTVIEWSERVERSTATEtodatadog;GRANTVIEWANYDEFINITIONtodatadog;-- If not using either of Log Shipping Monitoring (available in Agent v7.50+) or
-- SQL Server Agent Monitoring (available in Agent v7.57+), comment out the next three lines:
USEmsdb;CREATEUSERdatadogFORLOGINdatadog;GRANTSELECTtodatadog;

CREATELOGINdatadogWITHPASSWORD='<PASSWORD>';CREATEUSERdatadogFORLOGINdatadog;GRANTVIEWSERVERSTATEtodatadog;GRANTVIEWANYDEFINITIONtodatadog;-- If not using either of Log Shipping Monitoring (available in Agent v7.50+) or
-- SQL Server Agent Monitoring (available in Agent v7.57+), comment out the next three lines:
USEmsdb;CREATEUSERdatadogFORLOGINdatadog;GRANTSELECTtodatadog;

Create the datadog user in each additional application database:

USE[database_name];CREATEUSERdatadogFORLOGINdatadog;

Securely store your password

Store your password using secret management software such as Vault. You can then reference this password as ENC[<SECRET_NAME>] in your Agent configuration files: for example, ENC[datadog_user_database_password]. See Secrets Management for more information.

The examples on this page use datadog_user_database_password to refer to the name of the secret where your password is stored. It is possible to reference your password in plain text, but this is not recommended.

Install the Agent

It’s recommended to install the agent directly on the SQL Server host as that enables the agent to collect a variety of system telemetry (CPU, memory, disk, network) in addition to SQL Server specific telemetry.

Note: For AlwaysOn users, the recommended approach is to install the Agent on each individual replica, which will help provide related infrastructure metrics (CPU, memory, networking) for each replica. Telemetry for the relevant availability groups will be collected from each replica the agent is connected to. As a fallback method, the Agent can be installed on a separate server and connected to the cluster through the listener endpoint, but this will make it impossible to relate infrastructure metrics for the underlying host. To start collecting SQL Server telemetry, first install the Datadog Agent.

Create the SQL Server Agent conf file C:\ProgramData\Datadog\conf.d\sqlserver.d\conf.yaml. See the sample conf file for all available configuration options.

init_config:instances:- dbm:truehost:'<HOSTNAME>,<PORT>'username:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQL# Optional: For additional tagstags:- 'service:<CUSTOM_SERVICE>'- 'env:<CUSTOM_ENV>'

To use Windows Authentication, set connection_string: "Trusted_Connection=yes" and omit the username and password fields.

The agent supports SQL Server Browser Service in versions 7.41+. To enable SSBS, provide a port of 0 in the host string: <HOSTNAME>,0.

Use the service and env tags to link your database telemetry to other telemetry through a common tagging scheme. See Unified Service Tagging on how these tags are used throughout Datadog.

Supported Drivers

Microsoft ADO

The recommended ADO provider is Microsoft OLE DB Driver. Ensure the driver is installed on the host where the agent is running.

connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQL19 # Replace with MSOLEDBSQL for versions 18 and lower

The other two providers, SQLOLEDB and SQLNCLI, are considered deprecated by Microsoft and should no longer be used.

ODBC

The recommended ODBC driver is Microsoft ODBC Driver. Ensure the driver is installed on the host where the Agent is running.

connector:odbcdriver:'ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server'

Once all Agent configuration is complete, restart the Datadog Agent.

Validate

Run the Agent’s status subcommand and look for sqlserver under the Checks section. Navigate to the Databases page in Datadog to get started.

On Linux, the Datadog Agent additionally requires an ODBC SQL Server driver to be installed—for example, the Microsoft ODBC driver. Once an ODBC SQL Server is installed, copy the odbc.ini and odbcinst.ini files into the /opt/datadog-agent/embedded/etc folder.

Use the odbc connector and specify the proper driver as indicated in the odbcinst.ini file.

Create the SQL Server Agent conf file /etc/datadog-agent/conf.d/sqlserver.d/conf.yaml. See the sample conf file for all available configuration options.

init_config:instances:- dbm:truehost:'<HOSTNAME>,<PORT>'username:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'connector:odbcdriver:'<Driver from the `odbcinst.ini` file>'# Optional: For additional tagstags:- 'service:<CUSTOM_SERVICE>'- 'env:<CUSTOM_ENV>'

Use the service and env tags to link your database telemetry to other telemetry through a common tagging scheme. See Unified Service Tagging on how these tags are used throughout Datadog.

Once all Agent configuration is complete, restart the Datadog Agent.

Validate

Run the Agent’s status subcommand and look for sqlserver under the Checks section. Navigate to the Databases page in Datadog to get started.

Example Agent Configurations

Connecting with DSN using the ODBC driver on Linux

Locate the odbc.ini and odbcinst.ini files. By default, these are placed in the /etc directory when installing ODBC.
Copy the odbc.ini and odbcinst.ini files into the /opt/datadog-agent/embedded/etc folder.

Configure your DSN settings as follows:

odbcinst.ini must provide at least one section header and ODBC driver location.

Example:

[ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server]
Description=Microsoft ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server
Driver=/opt/microsoft/msodbcsql18/lib64/libmsodbcsql-18.3.so.2.1
UsageCount=1

odbc.ini must provide a section header and a Driver path that matches odbcinst.ini.

Example:

[datadog]
Driver=/opt/microsoft/msodbcsql18/lib64/libmsodbcsql-18.3.so.2.1

Update the /etc/datadog-agent/conf.d/sqlserver.d/conf.yaml file with your DSN information.

Example:

instances:- dbm:truehost:'localhost,1433'username:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'connector:'odbc'driver:'ODBC Driver 18 for SQL Server'# This is the section header of odbcinst.inidsn:'datadog'# This is the section header of odbc.ini

Restart the Agent.

Using AlwaysOn

For AlwaysOn users, the Agent should be installed on each replica server and connected directly to each replica. The full set of AlwaysOn telemetry is collected from each individual replica, in addition to host-based telemetry (CPU, disk, memory, and so on) for each server.

instances:- dbm:truehost:'shopist-prod,1433'username:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQLdatabase_metrics:# If Availability Groups is enabledao_metrics:enabled:true# If Failover Clustering is enabledfci_metrics:enabled:true

Monitoring SQL Server Agent Jobs

To enable monitoring of SQL Server Agent jobs, the Datadog Agent must have access to the [msdb] database.

SQL Server Agent Jobs monitoring is not available for Azure SQL Database.

Monitoring of SQL Server Agent jobs is supported on SQL Server versions 2016 and newer. Starting from Agent v7.57, the Datadog Agent can collect SQL Server Agent job metrics and histories. To enable this feature, set enabled to true in the agent_jobs section of the SQL Server integration configuration file. The collection_interval and history_row_limit fields are optional.

instances:- dbm:truehost:'shopist-prod,1433'username:datadogpassword:'<PASSWORD>'connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQLagent_jobs:enabled:truecollection_interval:15history_row_limit:10000

Collecting schemas

Datadog Agent v7.56+ and SQL Server 2017 or higher are required for SQL Server schema collection.

To enable this feature, use the collect_schemas option. Schemas are collected on databases for which the Agent has CONNECT access.

To collect schema information from RDS instances, you must grant the datadog user explicit CONNECT access to each database on the instance. For more information, see Grant the Agent access.

Use the database_autodiscovery option to avoid specifying each logical database. See the sample sqlserver.d/conf.yaml for more details.

init_config:instances:# This instance detects every logical database automatically- dbm:truehost:'shopist-prod,1433'username:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQLdatabase_autodiscovery:truecollect_schemas:enabled:truedatabase_metrics:# Optional: enable metric collection for indexesindex_usage_metrics:enabled:true# This instance only collects schemas and index metrics from the `users` database- dbm:truehost:'shopist-prod,1433'username:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQLdatabase:userscollect_schemas:enabled:truedatabase_metrics:# Optional: enable metric collection for indexesindex_usage_metrics:enabled:true

Note: For Agent v7.68 and below, use schemas_collection instead of collect_schemas.

One Agent connecting to multiple hosts

It is common to configure a single Agent host to connect to multiple remote database instances (see Agent installation architectures for DBM). To connect to multiple hosts, create an entry for each host in the SQL Server integration config.

Datadog recommends using one Agent to monitor no more than 30 database instances.

Benchmarks show that one Agent running on a t4g.medium EC2 instance (2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM) can successfully monitor 30 RDS db.t3.medium instances (2 CPUs and 4GB of RAM).

init_config:instances:- dbm:truehost:'example-service-primary.example-host.com,1433'username:datadogconnector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQLpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'tags:- 'env:prod'- 'team:team-discovery'- 'service:example-service'- dbm:truehost:'example-service–replica-1.example-host.com,1433'connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQLusername:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'tags:- 'env:prod'- 'team:team-discovery'- 'service:example-service'- dbm:truehost:'example-service–replica-2.example-host.com,1433'connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQLusername:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'tags:- 'env:prod'- 'team:team-discovery'- 'service:example-service'[...]

Running custom queries

To collect custom metrics, use the custom_queries option. See the sample sqlserver.d/conf.yaml for more details.

init_config:instances:- dbm:truehost:'localhost,1433'connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQLusername:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'custom_queries:- query:SELECT age, salary, hours_worked, name FROM hr.employees;columns:- name:custom.employee_agetype:gauge- name:custom.employee_salarytype:gauge- name:custom.employee_hourstype:count- name:nametype:tagtags:- 'table:employees'

Working with hosts through a remote proxy

If the Agent must connect to a database host through a remote proxy, all telemetry is tagged with the hostname of the proxy rather than the database instance. Use the reported_hostname option to set a custom override of the hostname detected by the Agent.

init_config:instances:- dbm:truehost:'localhost,1433'connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQLusername:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'reported_hostname:products-primary- dbm:truehost:'localhost,1433'connector:adodbapiadoprovider:MSOLEDBSQLusername:datadogpassword:'ENC[datadog_user_database_password]'reported_hostname:products-replica-1

Discovering ports automatically

SQL Server Browser Service, Named Instances, and other services can automatically detect port numbers. You can use this instead of hardcoding port numbers in connection strings. To use the Agent with one of these services, set the port field to 0.

For example, a Named Instance config:

init_config:instances:- host:<hostname\instance name>port:0

URL: https://docs.datadoghq.com/database_monitoring/setup_sql_server/selfhosted/