When they said "just use the libraries" you didn't think this is what they meant...
The data runner is trapped in an infinite library, searching for your metrics. Open up a portal to watch him and see if you can get a better score than your peers! An idle game for the Datadog dashboard.
screenshot.mp4
Add the Data Runner widget to your dashboard, and choose a metric you want him to find. He'll run around the infinite library looking for it, and every time he finds it, the metric's value is added to your score. Leave him to run and see what you're up to at the end of the day!
Hang on, it can be any metric I feed into Datadog? So why wouldn't I just pick something with ridiculously high values?
Why wouldn't you do that? I think system.mem.committed_as is some pretty big numbers; it's nice to have a game with a score of 1.4×10¹¹.
Or even make up my own fictional metric and use the Metrics Submission API to send in really big numbers?
See, now you're gettin' it. Go wild.
This is a Datadog App that provides a dashboard widget. It uses the standalone version of the UI Extensions SDK (ui-extensions-sdk.min.js in this repo, built from the upstream github repo). For a simpler sort of widget which does less work (and so may show off the required file structures more clearly) it may be useful to examine dd-app-plain-html-grafana or Datadog's own starter kit for a React app.
On startup, it uses the widget API client to query the public Datadog API to get a list of your metrics (which it can do because it has the metrics_read scope), and then dynamically updates its widget settings menu to list the metrics.
When you choose a metric (either on first adding the widget to your dashboard, or at any time later with the edit button), the Datadog dashboard fires a dashboard_custom_widget_options_change custom event which the runner code listens for and records the metric name.
Then periodically the runner polls the metrics query API for that chosen metric and takes the highest value since the last time it asked, and adds that to the runner's score.
The imagery is all from the fantastic Kenney, and the font is from ooqq.