This is an AWS Marketplace only feature.

Overview

Several third party tools are available to manage and display Kill Bill’s metrics. One popular tool is Datadog. This package offers a low-cost option to monitor and display whatever metrics you may find useful from the Kill Bill collection, including metrics that show the performance and resource use of Kill Bill and Kaui themselves, and metrics describing the infrastructure on which these systems run.

Datadog can be integrated with several types of Kill Bill installations. In this document we discuss the use of Datadog to manage metrics produced by single-tier and multi-tier implementations on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With the latest Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for Kill Bill, the application is preconfigured to collect these metrics and to direct them to Datadog once authorization is provided. These instructions apply to the Kill Bill AMI version 2021.9 or later.

To set up Datadog to manage the metrics available from Kill Bill, there are just two steps:

  1. setup a Datadog account

  2. Edit a configuration file to enable the transfer of the complete Kill Bill metrics.

Set Up Datadog

You may already be familiar with Datadog. If not, this section will explain how to get started.

First, go to the Datadog website. Datadog offers a free trial to get started. After the trial, you will be charged monthly depending on what types of information you want them to manage. To sign up for the free trial, select "GET STARTED FREE" at the top of the page.

When you login to Datadog you will be taken to the Welcome page. Note the series of menu options on the left hand side.

Set Up the Authorization

To authorize the sending of the Kill Bill metrics, it is necessary to edit two lines in this file:

/var/lib/tomcat/bin/setenv2.sh

This file contains configuration information for tomcat, which manages the KillBill web applications.

This is a small file. The two lines to be edited are:

-Dcom.killbill.datadog.enable=false
-Dcom.killbill.datadog.apiKey=

These should be changed to:

-Dcom.killbill.datadog.enable=true
-Dcom.killbill.datadog.apiKey=Your-API-Key

To find your API key:

  1. Go to the Datadog Welcome page

  2. Scroll down to your email address in the left menu

  3. Select Organization Settings from the popup menu

  4. Select API Keys from the Organization Settings menu

After editing the file, go to your AWS EC2 dashboard and reboot the instance so the new configuration file will be read. If you have more than one instance, follow the same procedure for each one.

Test the Installation

To test the installation, return to datadog and choose Infrastructure, then Infrastructure List from the left menu. The table that appears should list all of your hosts and indicate their status as ACTIVE. You may need to wait a few minutes for the table to appear.

Now select Metrics, then Summary from the menu. After a short delay, you should see a long list of metrics — well over 1,000.

Congratulations. Your Datadog integration is complete!

Using Datadog

The Datadog site has lots of documentation, so we won’t repeat any of that here. We will just suggest a few quick steps to get started:

  1. Go to Metrics in the menu and Explorer in the submenu. Click on the field labeled Graph: to get a dropdown list of all available metrics.

  2. Select some metrics to see the graph they produce. Identify the ones you would like to see together in a dashboard.

  3. Gather the names of the metrics you want in the Graph: field together.

  4. Under Export these graphs to: select New Dashboard. Give your dashboard a name.

Your dashboard will appear in the Dashboard List under the Dashboards menu item. You can create and modify multiple dashboards. You can also adjust the graphs in many ways, and do lots of other things like setting alarms. Have fun and good luck!