Managing API and application keys
While the users log in to the Datadog UI, using their own credentials or an SSO platform for authentication, a key pair is used for authentication in programmatic access scenarios such as publishing metrics from a program or provisioning Datadog resources using Terraform. In both cases, the processes run independently outside of the Datadog environments and access must be authenticated.
The API key is associated with the organization and the application key is associated with a user account.
The keys can be set up from the Integrations | APIs page:
Figure 4.13 – APIs page
Once the key pair is available, that can be used for authentication as you can see in the following Python code snippet:
from datadog import initialize, api
options = {
    'api_key': '<DD_API_KEY>',
    'app_key': '<DD_APPLICATION_KEY>'
}
initialize...
