The Datadog Cluster Agent is a purpose-built tool designed to efficiently gather monitoring data from across an orchestrated cluster. It was developed to address the need for dynamic ways of monitoring containers and workloads in environments where orchestration technologies like Kubernetes, DC/OS, and Swarm manage container workloads both at the node level and at the cluster level. The Cluster Agent acts as a proxy between the API server and the node-based Agents, relieving the direct load on the API server while enabling node-based Agents to focus on collecting node-level data. It also implements the External Metrics Provider interface to expose metrics from your Datadog account to Kubernetes, allowing for automated Horizontal Pod Autoscaling based on real-time health and performance data. The Cluster Agent has been successfully tested on large Kubernetes clusters with hundreds of nodes and thousands of pods, reducing the load on API servers while providing valuable insights into cluster-level monitoring data.