Best practices

We reviewed the Datadog APIs and learned the basics of how they are called from curl and Python. Now, let's see what the best practices are for using the APIs for automating monitoring tasks:

• As mentioned earlier, try to leverage existing integrations as much as possible before writing your own code using Datadog APIs. This is mainly because the maintenance of custom code in the long term is expensive in general.
• If you must write code using APIs, start maintaining it in a source code control system from the very beginning.
• As we have seen with the sample programs, consider pulling useful monitoring information from other internal systems and publishing it on the Datadog platform as metrics and events using the APIs. Datadog is an excellent platform for aggregating information from disparate sources and it should be leveraged to extend the overall monitoring capability of the organization.
• APIs can be used to pull data out of Datadog for loading...