With the release of the Datadog Agent 5.1.0, we have introduced new options for tagging metrics collected by the JMX integration. In addition to automatically tagging metrics by their JMX object name, we now support assigning custom tags to each metric. The benefit here is that you are no longer limited to the tags assigned by the MBean developer, e.g. MBean domain. You can also use tags that are more descriptive such as an internal application name.

You can read more about configuring the JMX integration in the Datadog documentation. To achieve something like the example shown above, add the following line to the yaml file for the specific attribute:

tag: frontendweb

To take advantage of JMX custom tagging, upgrade to Datadog Agent 5.1 by following the instructions here. If you’re not currently a Datadog customer, sign up for a 14 day free trial and check out all of the latest enhancements, including JMX custom tagging, for yourself.

This feature came to us as a pull request from one of our customers, Keen.io. Cory Watson, a Principal Infrastructure Engineer at Keen IO was working with an older version of Cassandra. They had a need to enumerate each column’s family’s metrics as a separate JMX query. Unfortunately, the resulting tags were messy. Cory went ahead and created an update to jmxfetch and submitted a GitHub pull request. After a little back and forth, we were able to deploy it as part of the Datadog Agent 5.1.

Thanks so much to Cory and Keen IO for helping us deliver better support for JMX in Datadog.