Vector
Vector is an open source high-performance observability data pipeline from Datadog for collecting, transforming, and routing logs, metrics, and traces. Built in Rust for performance and reliability, Vector supports 50+ sources, 20+ transforms, and 80+ sinks. It provides a built-in API for health monitoring and component inspection, plus Vector Remap Language (VRL) for powerful data transformation.
APIs
Vector Observability API
The Vector Observability API provides HTTP endpoints for health monitoring of running Vector instances and gRPC endpoints for component inspection and event streaming. Enable vi...
Vector Remap Language (VRL)
Vector Remap Language (VRL) is a purpose-built expression language for transforming observability data in Vector. Provides 100+ built-in functions for parsing, filtering, enrich...
Vector Helm Charts
Official Helm charts for deploying Vector on Kubernetes as a DaemonSet (agent mode) or Deployment (aggregator mode).
Capabilities
Vector Pipeline Monitoring
Workflow capability for DevOps engineers monitoring Vector observability pipeline health. Provides health check access for integration with load balancers, Kubernetes probes, an...
Run with NaftikoFeatures
Built in Rust with benchmarks showing 86+ MiB/s throughput for log pipeline workloads.
Single binary handles logs, metrics, and traces from collection through routing.
Native integrations for files, Kafka, Kubernetes, AWS S3/CloudWatch, Splunk, and more.
Route data to Elasticsearch, Datadog, S3, BigQuery, Splunk, Loki, and many more destinations.
Purpose-built expression language with 100+ functions for transforming observability data.
Built-in HTTP/gRPC API for health checks and component inspection (must be explicitly enabled).
Deploy as DaemonSet (agent) or Deployment (aggregator) with official Helm charts.
Run as a lightweight agent on each node or as a centralized aggregator for fan-in routing.
Use Cases
Replace multiple log shippers with a single Vector pipeline for all log collection and routing.
Filter, sample, and transform data before sending to expensive SaaS observability platforms.
Route observability data to multiple backends simultaneously to facilitate migration.
Deploy Vector as a DaemonSet to collect container logs from all Kubernetes nodes.
Parse, enrich, and normalize log events using VRL before routing to downstream systems.
Collect host and service metrics using Vector's built-in sources and forward to Prometheus or DataDog.
Use Vector to filter and route Splunk data to reduce indexing volume and licensing costs.
Integrations
Native Datadog logs and metrics sink; Vector was created and is maintained by Datadog.
Elasticsearch sink for forwarding logs and metrics to Elasticsearch clusters.
Splunk HTTP Event Collector sink for sending data to Splunk Enterprise and Cloud.
Kafka source and sink for consuming and producing observability data streams.
S3 sink for archiving logs and metrics to Amazon S3 for long-term storage.
Loki sink for forwarding logs to Grafana's log aggregation system.
Prometheus remote write sink and scrape source for metrics pipelines.
Kubernetes source for collecting container logs, pod metadata, and events.