Today we’re excited to launch Apollo’s APM Dashboard Templates for Datadog, an opinionated telemetry recipe and importable dashboards that give you production-grade visibility into your Apollo Router and supergraph in minutes.
In the past, getting Datadog “just right” meant hand-wiring OpenTelemetry, aligning tags, naming spans, surfacing GraphQL errors, and building dashboards from scratch, often resulting in inconsistent views and surprise cardinality costs.
Our new templates dramatically reduce both the initial setup and ongoing maintenance by packaging best-practice instrumentation and dashboards out of the box. With them you can:
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Stand up visibility fast: Import a ready-made Datadog dashboard JSON and see golden signals (requests, p95/p99, error rate, saturation) instantly.
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Standardize APM views: Stable operation.name for router / supergraph / subgraph and sensible resource.name defaults keep charts and traces aligned.
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Surface GraphQL errors as first-class signals: Errors are marked in spans and metrics, so failures are obvious and correlated to latency.
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Drill down with confidence: Pivot from router health to the specific subgraph or operation that’s driving regressions.
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Filter reliably across environments: Built around Datadog’s Unified Service Tagging (service, env, version) for clean team-to-team workflows and version overlays.
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Control observability spend: Low-cardinality defaults and guidance for tail-based sampling help you keep costs predictable at high volume.
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Fit your ingestion method: Works with Datadog OTEL Collector (DDOT), upstream OTEL Collector, Datadog Agent, or Agentless OTLP.
If you’re using Datadog with Apollo Router, give the templates a try and tell us what you think. Your feedback will help us finalize the template and future Terraform packaging.