Datadog: define a metrics path, then ship a dashboard template

[janiussyafiq]

Description

Roughly 50 aisix_* Prometheus series are exposed on a dedicated metrics listener, and there is a native Datadog exporter — but it targets the Logs HTTP intake only (crates/aisix-obs/src/sink/datadog.rs), so there is no Datadog metrics/series path at all. observability.metrics.otlp parses into OtlpConfig but has no consumers; OTLP metrics export is still on the roadmap.

The repo also ships no importable dashboard template for any backend, and the docs contain no mapping from the aisix_* series to Datadog.

Requested, in order:

1. Decide and implement how aisix_* metrics reach Datadog — Datadog metrics intake, Agent/OpenMetrics scrape of the metrics listener, log-based metrics off the existing intake, or finishing the OTLP metrics stub.
2. Author a Datadog dashboard template, importable from the repo, covering requests and errors by model, latency percentiles, token throughput, cost, cache hit rate, guardrail blocks and rate-limit rejects.

Why

Teams standardised on Datadog judge an integration by whether metrics arrive and a dashboard exists to import; a logs-only exporter (#57, api7/AISIX-Cloud#688) does not give them a gateway view.

Prior art exists in the portfolio — the API7 EE datadog plugin ships metrics via DogStatsD.

Priority

Low.

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Prior art

Product	Has it	Reference
LiteLLM	Yes	datadog_metrics callback + official Datadog integration tile
Bifrost	Partial	Datadog connector (enterprise)
Kong AI Gateway	Partial	Prometheus metrics, Datadog via plugin
Portkey	Partial	OTel export
Envoy AI Gateway	No	none found
Cloudflare AI Gateway	No	none found
Helicone	No	none found

LiteLLM is the only peer covering both halves, and has an official Datadog integration tile.

_{Surveyed 2026-07-15; every claim rests on a fetched docs/source page.}

[coderabbitai]

🔗 Related PRs

#331 - feat: add AISIX-native Prometheus metrics [merged]
#646 - fix(responses): attribute per-PK telemetry tags on /v1/responses usage events [merged]
#738 - fix(obs): emit deployment cooldown metrics on state transitions [merged]
#740 - feat(obs): add cache-inclusive token_type=total to tokens_by_client metric [merged]

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