The metrics end-point allows you to post time-series data that can be graphed on Datadog’s dashboards. The maximum payload size is 3.2 megabytes (3200000 bytes). Compressed payloads must have a decompressed size of less than 62 megabytes (62914560 bytes).

If you’re submitting metrics directly to the Datadog API without using DogStatsD, expect:

• 64 bits for the timestamp
• 64 bits for the value
• 40 bytes for the metric names
• 50 bytes for the timeseries
• The full payload is approximately 100 bytes. However, with the DogStatsD API, compression is applied, which reduces the payload size.

{
  "series": [
    {
      "metric": "system.load.1",
      "points": [
        [
          1475317847,
          0.7
        ]
      ]
    }
  ]
}