The process check lets you:

• Collect resource usage metrics for specific running processes on any host: CPU, memory, I/O, number of threads, etc
• Use Process Monitors: configure thresholds for how many instances of a specific process ought to be running and get alerts when the thresholds aren't met (see Service Checks below).

The process check is packaged with the Agent, so simply install the Agent anywhere you want to use the check.

If you need the newest version of the Process check, install the dd-check-process package; this package's check overrides the one packaged with the Agent. See the integrations-core repository README.md for more details.

Unlike many checks, the process check doesn't monitor anything useful by default; you must tell it which processes you want to monitor, and how.

While there's no standard default check configuration, here's an example process.yaml that monitors ssh/sshd processes. See the sample process.yaml for all available configuration options:

init_config:

instances:
  - name: ssh
    search_string: ['ssh', 'sshd']

# To search for sshd processes using an exact cmdline
# - name: ssh
#   search_string: ['/usr/sbin/sshd -D']
#   exact_match: True

Our process check uses the psutil python package to check processes on your machine. By default this process check works on exact match and looks at the process names only. By setting exact_match to False in your yaml file, the agent looks at the command used to launch your process and recognizes every process that contains your keywords.

You can also configure the check to find any process by exact PID (pid) or pidfile (pid_file). If you provide more than one of search_string, pid, and pid_file, the check uses the first option it finds in that order (e.g. it uses search_string over pid_file if you configure both).

To have the check search for processes in a path other than /proc, set procfs_path: <your_proc_path> in datadog.conf, NOT in process.yaml (its use has been deprecated there). Set this to /host/proc if you're running the Agent from a Docker container (i.e. docker-dd-agent) and want to monitor processes running on the server hosting your containers. You DON'T need to set this to monitor processes running in your containers; the Docker check monitors those.

See the example configuration for more details on configuration options.

Restart the Agent to start sending process metrics and service checks to Datadog.

Run the Agent's status subcommand and look for process under the Checks section:

  Checks
  ======
    [...]

    process
    -------
      - instance #0 [OK]
      - instance #1 [OK]
      - Collected 26 metrics, 0 events & 1 service check

    [...]

Each instance configured in process.yaml should have one instance #<num> [OK] line in the output, regardless of how many search_strings it might be configured with.

The process check is compatible with all major platforms.

Note: Some metrics are not available on Linux or OSX:

• Process I/O metrics aren't available on Linux or OSX since the files that the agent must read (/proc//io) are only readable by the process's owner. For more information, read the Agent FAQ
• system.cpu.iowait is not available on windows

See metadata.csv for a list of metrics provided by this check.

All metrics are per instance configured in process.yaml, and are tagged process_name:<instance_name>.

The Process check does not include any event at this time.

process.up:

The Agent submits this service check for each instance in process.yaml, tagging each with process:<name>.

For an instance with no thresholds specified, the service check has a status of either CRITICAL (zero processes running) or OK (at least one process running).

For an instance with thresholds specified, consider this example:

instances:
  - name: my_worker_process
    search_string: ['/usr/local/bin/worker']
    thresholds:
      critical: [1, 7]
      warning: [3, 5]

The Agent submits a process.up tagged process:my_worker_process whose status is:

• CRITICAL when there are less than 1 or more than 7 worker processes
• WARNING when there are 1, 2, 6, or 7 worker processes
• OK when there are 3, 4 or 5 worker processes

Need help? Contact Datadog Support.

To get a better idea of how (or why) to monitor process resource consumption with Datadog, check out our series of blog posts about it.