Chef is a platform that automates configuration management for your infrastructure, supporting a continuous delivery workflow. It monitors the state of resources across your infrastructure to ensure each resource is in the desired state with every Chef run. Chef uses policies to manage workflows and operational requirements, applying configurations to machines based on their server type or where they fit in an organization's development process. The platform operates on three foundational elements: nodes, a workstation, and the Chef server. Nodes are managed by Chef, while the workstation is used to create configurations for your infrastructure. The Chef server acts as a hub for all your infrastructure's configurations and communicates between your workstation and each node. Chef enables you to implement infrastructure as code, efficiently manage all of the nodes across your infrastructure, and implement monitoring as code using its integration with Datadog. This integration provides real-time visibility into what is happening with your Chef resources, run-time performance, and execution failures. By deploying the Datadog Agent on your nodes using Chef roles, you can collect system-level metrics for your nodes by default and configure specific integrations such as Prometheus for collecting custom metrics.