Datadog Synthetic
Developer ToolPart of development, monitoring, or deployment workflows.
Recommended action: Allow if recognized as part of your tech stack.
Category
Developer Tool
Primary use case
Development and monitoring
Trust level
Generally safe
Trust Levels
- Trusted
- Generally safe
- Review recommended
- Caution advised
Trust levels are an indication based on category, operator, and robots.txt compliance. Always review bot activity for your specific situation.
Learn how we assess trustrobots.txt
Unknown
What is Datadog Synthetic?
Developer Helper bot
What Datadog Synthetic means for your site
Datadog Synthetic is a developer tool with an undocumented operator. Its activity on your site should be reviewed to determine whether it is beneficial, neutral, or unwanted. Robots.txt compliance is not confirmed for this bot.
What should you do?
- Review this bot's activity in BotSights
- Check which pages it visits most frequently
- Consider server-side blocking if access is unwanted
See Datadog Synthetic on your own site
BotSights tracks every Datadog Synthetic visit in real time, including which pages it crawls, how often, and from where.
How to identify Datadog Synthetic
Datadog Synthetic uses the user-agent "datadog synthetic" and robots.txt compliance unconfirmed.
datadog syntheticDatadog SyntheticHow to block Datadog Synthetic
Three robots.txt options below. Pick the one that matches your goal. Each snippet lists every known Datadog Synthetic user-agent pattern so the rules apply regardless of which one the bot announces. Compliance with robots.txt is unconfirmed for Datadog Synthetic, so verify with crawl logs after deploying.
Edit robots.txt with care
A single misplaced line can de-index your entire site. Common mistake: pasting User-agent: * followed by Disallow: / blocks every bot, not just Datadog Synthetic, including Googlebot. Always paste the snippet between existing rules (not over them), keep the User-agent line scoped to Datadog Synthetic's patterns, and verify with Google's robots.txt tester before deploying. If you are not sure, ask a developer first.
Option 1: Block all access
Tells Datadog Synthetic not to crawl any URL on your site. Use this when you want the bot completely off your content.
User-agent: datadog synthetic
User-agent: Datadog Synthetic
Disallow: /Option 2: Block specific paths only
Keep public content crawlable but exclude sensitive or non-public sections. Add one Disallow: line per path. Replace the example paths with your own.
User-agent: datadog synthetic
User-agent: Datadog Synthetic
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /checkout/Option 3: Slow down with a crawl delay
Crawl-delay is a voluntary directive that asks the bot to wait the given number of seconds between requests. Useful when Datadog Synthetic is hammering your origin and slowing the site down for real visitors, but you do not want to block it outright. The value is in seconds, so 10 means at most one request every ten seconds. Not all bots honour this directive (Googlebot ignores it; Bingbot, Yandex, and many AI crawlers do respect it).
User-agent: datadog synthetic
User-agent: Datadog Synthetic
Crawl-delay: 10Frequently Asked Questions
Is Datadog Synthetic safe?
The operator is not publicly documented. Review its behavior on your site to determine whether it is beneficial.
Should I block Datadog Synthetic?
Review its activity first. Server-side rules may be needed to block it.
Other Developer Tool bots
Know what Datadog Synthetic is doing on your site
See which pages it visits, how often it appears, and whether it is helping your visibility or worth blocking.
- Bot activity tracked per page
- AI and search crawler insights
- Better allow, monitor, or block decisions
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