Custom Shell Check for Datadog Agents

The Datadog agent stands out for its extensibility. While many out-of-the-box integrations exist, edge cases often require custom solutions.

This article presents a standalone custom check that executes shell commands and retrieves numeric values from their output, publishing results to Datadog as metrics named shell.your_metric_name at regular agent check intervals.

The check overcomes versioning challenges where previous implementations relied on agent-included code that changed across updates. This rewritten version operates independently.

The complete code is available at the GitHub repository: themsquared/datadog-checks/shell. For configuration and implementation guidance, consult the official Datadog Agent documentation.