Now liveThe Skillselion MCP - thousands of ranked skills, loaded into your agent mid-task. No install.Get it →
datadog-labs avatar

Verify Ssi

  • 224 installs
  • 147 repo stars
  • Updated July 29, 2026
  • datadog-labs/agent-skills

Verify Datadog Single Step Instrumentation is correctly injecting tracers and agents across services, confirming env vars, library hooks, and live telemetry without manual SDK edits.

About

Verifies Datadog Single Step Instrumentation deployments by checking tracer injection, environment configuration, and emitted traces or metrics so teams can ship auto-instrumented services knowing observability is active without manual SDK rewrites.

  • Validates SSI injection on services
  • Checks required env and tags
  • Confirms live traces and metrics flow
  • Detects misconfigured auto-instrumentation
  • Supports pre-release observability gates

Verify Ssi by the numbers

  • 224 all-time installs (skills.sh)
  • Ranked #380 of 1,435 DevOps & CI/CD skills by installs in the Skillselion catalog
  • Data as of Jul 30, 2026 (Skillselion catalog sync)
npx skills add https://github.com/datadog-labs/agent-skills --skill verify-ssi

Add your badge

Show developers this skill is listed on Skillselion. Paste this into your README.

Listed on Skillselion
Installs224
repo stars147
Last updatedJuly 29, 2026
Repositorydatadog-labs/agent-skills

What it does

Verify Datadog Single Step Instrumentation is correctly injecting tracers and agents across services, confirming env vars, library hooks, and live telemetry without manual SDK edits.

Files

SKILL.mdMarkdownGitHub ↗

Verify APM SSI on Kubernetes

Before doing anything else: Fully resolve all variables in ## Context to resolve before acting. Do not begin Step 1 until every variable has a concrete value.

Triggers

Invoke this skill when the user expresses intent to:

  • Confirm SSI is working after enabling APM
  • Check whether pods are being instrumented
  • Verify the tracer is running and reporting telemetry
  • Confirm tracer config is applied correctly

Do NOT invoke this skill if:

  • SSI has not been enabled yet — run enable-ssi first
  • Pods are not being instrumented at all — use troubleshoot-ssi

---

Prerequisites

  • [ ] enable-ssi is complete
  • [ ] Application pods have been restarted since SSI was enabled

pup-cli: check, install, and authenticate

Claude runs

pup --version

If not found:

Claude runs

brew tap datadog-labs/pack
brew install pup

Check auth:

pup auth status --site <DD_SITE>

If not authenticated:

Claude runs

pup auth login --site <DD_SITE>
This opens a browser tab for OAuth. Complete the login there — Claude will continue once the command exits.

If valid token — proceed. ERROR: No browser available — use API key fallback: export DD_APP_KEY=<your-app-key>

---

Context to resolve before acting

VariableHow to resolve
CLUSTER_NAMECheck spec.global.clusterName in datadog-agent.yaml, or kubectl config current-context
ENVCheck tags.datadoghq.com/env label on the application Deployment
SERVICE_NAMECheck tags.datadoghq.com/service label on the application Deployment

---

Step 1: Confirm Pods are Instrumented

Claude runs

kubectl get pod -l app=<APP_LABEL> -n <APP_NAMESPACE> \
  -o jsonpath='{.items[0].spec.initContainers[*].name}'

If the output includes datadog-lib-<language>-init and datadog-init-apm-inject — SSI init containers are injected.

ERROR: Init containers missing — pod was not restarted after SSI was enabled, or namespace targeting is not matching. Restart the pod and recheck.

---

Step 2: Confirm the Tracer is Reporting Telemetry

Claude runs

DD_SITE=<DD_SITE> pup apm services list --env <ENV> --from 1h

If <SERVICE_NAME> appears in the services list with isTraced: true — continue to Step 3.

ERROR: Service missing — send some traffic to the app first, then retry:

Claude runs

# Port-forward and send test traffic
kubectl port-forward deployment/<DEPLOYMENT_NAME> 8099:8000 -n <APP_NAMESPACE> &
sleep 2 && for i in $(seq 1 10); do curl -s -o /dev/null http://localhost:8099/; done
sleep 30 && kill %1 2>/dev/null
DD_SITE=<DD_SITE> pup apm services list --env <ENV> --from 10m

ERROR: Still missing after traffic — check the agent's trace receiver: kubectl exec -n <AGENT_NAMESPACE> <AGENT_POD> -c agent -- agent status | grep -A 10 "Receiver (previous minute)". If receiver shows 0 traces, go to troubleshoot-ssi.

---

Step 3: Confirm Tracer Configuration

Only run this step if `ddTraceConfigs` was explicitly configured in `enable-ssi` (e.g. profiling, AppSec, Data Streams). If basic SSI was set up without ddTraceConfigs, skip this step — an empty response here is expected and not a failure.

Claude runs

pup apm service-library-config get \
  --service-name <SERVICE_NAME> \
  --env <ENV>

If the output shows expected environment variables matching what was configured in ddTraceConfigs — done.

If the output is empty and ddTraceConfigs was not configured — expected, not a failure.

ERROR: Config missing but ddTraceConfigs was configured — check it is present in the DatadogAgent manifest under the correct target, and that pods were restarted after the config change.

---

Done

Exit when ALL of the following are true:

  • [ ] Step 1: target pods appear in instrumented-pods list
  • [ ] Step 2: service appears in tracers list with active status
  • [ ] Step 3: tracer config matches what was set in DatadogAgent

If any check fails, go to troubleshoot-ssi.

When all steps pass, automatically proceed to onboarding-summary now — do not ask the user for permission.

---

Security constraints

  • Never write a raw API key into any file or chat message
  • Never run kubectl delete without user confirmation

Related skills

DevOps & CI/CDdevopsintegrationstesting

This week in AI coding

Five minutes, every Monday - the tools, releases and tactics for developers.

unsubscribe anytime.