4 ways to automate Datadog with Zapier

Datadog gives you deep visibility into your infrastructure, applications, and logs, helping your team track system health and respond quickly when things go wrong. But not every important signal comes from your servers or cloud services. Incidents, asset changes, issue tracking, and even customer activity can all provide valuable context about the state of your systems and the work happening around them.

By using Zapier to automate how this data flows into Datadog, you can extend your monitoring to include operational and business signals without relying on custom scripts or manual updates. Scroll down for some inspiration on ways to automate Datadog today.

Table of contents

• Enrich your monitoring with incident and alert activity

• Monitor IT activity alongside system metrics

• Surface issue tracking data in Datadog

• Track custom business or user activity metrics in Datadog

Enrich your monitoring with incident and alert activity

Monitoring infrastructure and application health is at the core of Datadog, but critical signals often come from outside those systems. Incidents declared in your on-call platform or alerts fired by external monitoring tools often represent the real moments when things go wrong. Logging this activity as custom metrics in Datadog helps bring that context directly into your dashboards and monitoring workflows.

For example, you can automatically post a new metric in Datadog whenever a check fails in Uptime.com, an incident is declared in incident.io, or a PagerDuty alert is triggered. These metrics make it easier to track incident volume over time, visualize where problems are happening, and correlate operational issues with your infrastructure data. You might notice, for instance, that spikes in API latency tend to align with periods of high alert activity, or that a particular service is responsible for most incidents.

Adding incident and alert data as custom metrics helps teams respond faster, understand root causes more clearly, and continuously improve how they handle issues across their stack.

Monitor IT activity alongside system metrics

Many operational issues start long before they show up in system metrics. New assets being added, service requests piling up, or tickets escalating in your IT management tools can all be early signals that something needs attention. By logging activity into Datadog from platforms like ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus Cloud, Freshservice, and SolarWinds Service Desk, you can keep these events visible alongside your infrastructure and application monitoring.

For example, you could record a custom metric every time a new asset is registered in SolarWinds, or track the number of open tickets in Freshservice as they're created and updated. These metrics help your team monitor operational load and nip potential issues in the bud before they escalate.

Pro tip: Build an AI agent that helps you go beyond just counting tickets. An agent can analyze patterns—like repeat incidents, trending services, or escalations tied to specific systems—then flag potential root causes, helping your team catch issues sooner and respond more strategically. Read our guide to getting started with Zapier Agents.

Surface issue tracking data in Datadog

While Datadog is primarily designed for monitoring infrastructure and applications, there may be situations where tracking activity from your project management tools can provide helpful context. Logging issue creation, bug reports, or task updates from platforms like Jira, Linear, or Asana as custom metrics could offer an additional signal when monitoring for risks or bottlenecks.

For example, you might log a custom metric in Datadog each time a bug is reported in Jira, a task is created in Xpertly, or an issue is updated in Linear. This approach may be especially useful in environments where frequent issue creation or escalations tend to align with system instability or deployment challenges. By surfacing these signals alongside your infrastructure metrics, you can help your team see factors that may be impacting your systems.

This use case won't apply to every team. But it is perfect for teams operating in high-change environments, or where engineering activity is closely tied to system health. In those cases, bringing project activity into your monitoring stack can help you identify emerging risks sooner and prioritize work more effectively.

Pro tip: Only want to log critical issues? Add a filter step to send Datadog just the high-priority alerts. This helps keep your dashboards clear and focused on what matters most. Read our guide to using Filter by Zapier.

Track custom business or user activity metrics in Datadog

Business events like customer signups, payments, and form submissions can tell you just as much about the health of your systems as CPU usage or error rates. By logging these activities as custom metrics in Datadog, you can bring real-time business context into your monitoring workflows. 

For example, you could add a custom metric every time a Stripe payment is processed, a deal is created in HubSpot, or an order comes through Shopify. You could also track survey submissions from Typeform or new entries added to Google Sheets or Notion. 

This can be helpful for ops teams or SREs supporting revenue-critical systems, where keeping business signals close to system metrics helps surface issues faster—and keeps engineering efforts aligned with customer outcomes. If your team already uses Datadog dashboards to monitor key services, adding business activity metrics can offer a quick, real-time view of the events that matter most, without the need for a separate BI tool or complex data pipeline.

Gain a more connected view across your stack

Your monitoring tools are most powerful when they reflect the full story of what's happening across your systems. By using Zapier to automate how business events, operational activity, and engineering workflows are captured in Datadog, you give your team the context they need to investigate issues quickly and stay focused on what matters. 

And these workflows are just the start of what you can accomplish with Zapier and Datadog. What will you automate first?