Monitor Karpenter with Datadog

A step-by-step guide to monitoring Karpenter using Datadog, covering how to enable the Karpenter integration via Autodiscovery and Kubernetes annotations, verify metric scraping, and optionally collect logs. It explains how to visualize and alert on NodeClaim lifecycle metrics, reconciliation latency, cloud provider API performance, and Spot interruptions. The post also covers using Datadog Cloud Cost Management (CCM) to correlate Karpenter's scaling and consolidation behavior with actual cloud spend, enabling cost attribution by namespace/pod, anomaly-based cost alerts, and postmortem documentation.