Configuring notifications in Datadog is a critical aspect of monitoring your infrastructure and applications. With various methods of delivering alerts—such as email, Slack, SMS, and webhooks—Datadog ensures that your team stays informed in real-time, helping you respond quickly to potential issues.

Whether you need to escalate critical alerts or route notifications to different teams, Datadog offers a flexible system to suit your needs.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the configuration process for notifications, explore available notification options, and demonstrate how to set up integrations like Slack and Twilio for SMS notifications.

Datadog allows you to configure flexible and detailed notifications for your monitors, ensuring that alerts are sent to the right people at the right time.

Depending on your organization's communication preferences, you can use various notification channels, such as email, Slack, PagerDuty, webhooks, and more.

Here's a step-by-step guide:

1. Choose Notification Method: Navigate to your monitor settings and select the notification method. Datadog supports multiple options, such as email, Slack, PagerDuty, and webhooks. Choose the method based on your team's needs.
2. Define Contact Points: Add the specific contact information for each notification method. For email, you'll input the recipient addresses. For Slack or PagerDuty, you need to configure integrations by providing the relevant API keys or webhook URLs.
3. Customize Notification Messages: Using Datadog's templating engine, customize the alert message to include essential information. You can include template variables to dynamically insert details like the affected host, service, or metric. This helps provide context to the alert.
4. Set Notification Thresholds: Define the severity level for when notifications should be sent. You can adjust these settings based on how critical the issue is, ensuring that high-priority alerts reach the right people quickly.
5. Test Notifications: After setting up your notifications, it’s important to test them to ensure the alerts are delivered correctly. Datadog provides options to trigger test alerts and verify that the configuration works as expected.
6. Escalation Policies: If needed, configure escalation policies. This allows you to route alerts to secondary contacts or teams if an alert isn’t acknowledged within a set period, ensuring no critical alerts go unnoticed.

For detailed guidance, visit Datadog's Monitor Notification Documentation.

In Datadog, various notification options allow teams to stay informed about critical alerts, enabling timely responses to incidents.

Here are some key notification options available:

1. Email Notifications: Datadog allows alerts to be sent via email. You can configure multiple email addresses to ensure that all necessary team members receive notifications.
2. Slack Integration: Datadog can send notifications directly to Slack channels, helping teams collaborate in real-time. By setting up a Slack integration, you can ensure that alerts are shared in specific channels and include contextual information for quick troubleshooting.
3. PagerDuty Integration: For incident management, Datadog integrates seamlessly with PagerDuty, enabling on-call teams to receive alerts and manage escalations based on predefined workflows.
4. Webhooks: Webhooks allow you to send notifications to custom systems. This is useful for integrating Datadog alerts with in-house tools or third-party platforms.
5. Opsgenie & VictorOps: Datadog also supports integrations with other incident response tools like Opsgenie and VictorOps, ensuring that alerts are routed to the right on-call personnel.
6. Mobile Push Notifications: Using Datadog's mobile app, you can receive push notifications directly on your phone for immediate awareness of critical incidents.
7. Customizable Alerts: You can customize the alert messages using template variables, which allow you to include relevant details such as the specific host, service, or metric that triggered the alert. This helps provide context and urgency for the team handling the incident.

For more details, you can refer to the Datadog Notification Options Guide.

To set up SMS alerts using webhooks in Datadog, you can integrate with services like Twilio, which allows you to send SMS notifications when an alert is triggered.

Here’s how to configure it:

1. Create a Webhook Integration in Datadog

• First, navigate to Integrations > Webhooks in your Datadog dashboard.
• Click on Create Webhook and provide a name for the integration (e.g., "Twilio SMS Alerts").
• In the URL field, enter the webhook URL provided by your SMS service provider, such as Twilio.

For Twilio, you'll need to generate the webhook URL using your Twilio account and the required credentials (like your Twilio phone number, account SID, and authentication token).

2. Configure the Webhook Payload

• The webhook's payload is a customizable message that includes the details of the alert. For Twilio, you can include the recipient's phone number and the message content in the payload.

A sample payload for Twilio could look like this:

• Make sure to replace {{your_phone_number}} and {{twilio_phone_number}} with actual values from your Twilio dashboard.

3. Test the Webhook

• After setting up the webhook and defining the payload, trigger a test alert to verify that the SMS is being sent correctly to your phone. You should receive an SMS containing the alert details when the specified conditions are met.

4. Add the Webhook to Your Notification Settings

• Once the webhook is tested and confirmed, you can include it in the notification settings for any monitor in Datadog.
• When configuring a monitor, choose the webhook you just created as the notification method. This will ensure that an SMS is sent every time the monitor's alert conditions are triggered.

By following these steps, you can integrate Twilio with Datadog via webhooks to send SMS alerts directly to your phone when critical issues arise.For more detailed instructions, you can refer to Datadog's Webhooks Documentation and this guide on setting up SMS alerts with Twilio.

Integrating Datadog with Slack allows you to receive real-time alerts and monitor critical infrastructure and application metrics directly within Slack channels. This integration enhances collaboration by sending Datadog alerts, metrics, and dashboards to the channels where your team communicates.

Here’s how to set it up and use it effectively:

1. Install the Datadog Slack App:

• To integrate Datadog with Slack, you need to install the Datadog Slack App from the Slack App Directory. You can either do this via the Datadog Integrations page or by searching for the app in Slack’s App Directory.
• In the Datadog dashboard, navigate to Integrations > Slack and click Install. You’ll need to authorize Datadog to connect with your Slack workspace.

2. Authorize and Configure Slack Integration:

• Once you install the app, you need to authorize Datadog to access your Slack workspace. Click on Authorize to grant the necessary permissions.
• After authorization, you can configure which Slack channels Datadog alerts will be sent to by selecting them in the integration settings.

3. Send Alerts to Slack:

• After setting up the integration, you can configure Datadog monitors to send notifications directly to Slack channels.
• In the Monitors section of Datadog, select Slack as the notification destination. You can add a customized alert message using template variables such as {{alert.title}}, {{alert.severity}}, or {{alert.condition}} to include relevant details about the alert.

4. Use Slash Commands for Monitoring:

• The Slack integration also supports slash commands to interact with Datadog directly from Slack. For example, you can use /datadog metric to quickly retrieve specific metric information or /datadog monitor to view the status of your monitors.
• These commands enhance productivity by allowing team members to access Datadog data without leaving the Slack workspace.

5. Manage Alerts and Resolve Issues:

• From within Slack, users can click on alerts to view more details in Datadog, such as graphs, historical data, or logs. This allows teams to investigate and resolve issues quickly.
• You can also take actions such as acknowledging an alert directly from Slack, ensuring that team members know someone is working on the issue.

6. Escalation and Channel Management:

• Configuring escalation policies in Datadog allows you to manage where alerts are routed within Slack. For example, critical production alerts can be sent to an on-call team’s dedicated Slack channel, while non-critical alerts can go to general operations channels.

For more detailed instructions on configuring the Slack integration, visit the official Datadog Slack Integration Documentation.

Webhooks in Datadog allow you to send alerts to external systems, trigger custom actions, integrate with third-party services, or notify other platforms when an alert condition is met. By setting up webhooks, you can enhance your alerting workflows with more customized and automated responses.

Steps to Configure Webhooks in Datadog:

1. Create a Webhook Endpoint:
   • First, set up an endpoint on the system or service where you want Datadog to send alerts. The endpoint should be able to accept POST requests with JSON payloads.
   • This could be an HTTP endpoint on services like Twilio for sending SMS alerts or your custom API for triggering automated actions such as restarting a service or scaling infrastructure.
2. Configure the Webhook in Datadog:
   • In the Datadog dashboard, navigate to Integrations > Webhooks.
   • Click on Add Webhook to create a new webhook.
   • Fill in the required fields:
     • Name: Provide a name for the webhook.
     • URL: Enter the endpoint URL where Datadog will send the POST requests.
     • Payload: Customize the payload format. You can include dynamic variables such as {{alert_title}}, {{alert_status}}, and {{trigger_time}} to include alert-specific information. This will help structure the data in a way that your endpoint can easily process.
   • Optionally, configure custom headers if your webhook requires authentication (e.g., API keys).
3. Customize Webhook Payload:
   • You can structure the payload to include the relevant details from the monitor that triggered the alert. For example, to send alerts via Twilio SMS, you can configure the payload to include the necessary parameters such as To, From, and Body.

Example payload for Twilio:

• This ensures that the webhook sends relevant, well-formatted data to the destination service.

1. Set Up the Monitor to Use the Webhook:
   • Once the webhook is configured, you need to assign it to a monitor. Go to your monitor configuration, and in the Notification settings, select Webhooks as the notification method.
   • Choose the webhook you created from the list of available webhooks and save the monitor.

[Image Source](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/send-alerts-sms-customizable-webhooks-twilio/#:~:text=The body in this example,about using Datadog's webhooks integration.): an example of all the information necessary to create a webhook.

1. Trigger the Webhook:
   • After setting up, it's important to test your webhook by triggering an alert condition to ensure that the data is sent correctly to the endpoint.
   • Monitor the response to verify the webhook payload is being received and processed as expected.

For more details on configuring webhooks in Datadog, check the official Datadog Webhooks Integration Guide or this Datadog and Twilio Integration Blog.