Autodiscovery ignoring your check: annotations belong on the workload pods

TL;DR

Check not in the agent image. Autodiscovery disabled or scoped.

Steps

1. agent status on the DaemonSet pod lists discovered checks per container. If your container is listed with no check, the annotation did not match. kubectl describe pod the workload and read the annotations back: compare character by character with the docs.
2. Move the annotations to the pod template, fix the names, mount custom checks, restart the agent pod to force re-discovery. Then confirm the check shows OK in status before looking at dashboards.

When to use

You are seeing this: What you see: the agent runs, the workload runs, but the integration check (redis, postgres, nginx) never appears in agent status and its metrics are missing. Use this skill when you run into "Autodiscovery ignoring your check: annotations belong on the workload pods".

When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

Why this happens

Annotations on the wrong object.

The Kubernetes installation docs note containers rely on Autodiscovery instead of config files, with DDAPIKEY and DD_SITE as env vars; Autodiscovery reads annotations on workload pods to configure checks. Verified against live docs 2026-09-26.