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Datadog CI Visibility collects test results, durations, and failure information from your Node.js test runs and surfaces them in the Datadog CI Visibility product. You can track flaky tests, monitor test suite health over time, and correlate slow tests with code changes.

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What CI Visibility captures

Test results

Pass, fail, and skip status for every test, test suite, and test session.

Timing

Duration of individual tests, suites, and full CI runs, with a breakdown by module.

Error details

Stack traces, error messages, and the first failing assertion for failed tests.

Flaky tests

Detection of tests that alternate between passing and failing across runs. Early Flake Detection quarantines newly flaky tests automatically.

Test coverage

Code coverage data correlated with test runs (when coverage instrumentation is enabled).

CI pipeline context

Branch, commit SHA, pipeline ID, and CI provider metadata attached to every test run.

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Supported test frameworks

dd-trace automatically instruments the following Node.js test frameworks:
  • Jest (jest)
  • Mocha (mocha)
  • Vitest (vitest)
  • Cucumber (@cucumber/cucumber)
  • Cypress (cypress)
  • Playwright (@playwright/test)
  • Selenium (selenium-webdriver)
  • NYC (nyc — for coverage)

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Supported CI providers

CI environment variables are automatically detected for the following providers:
  • GitHub Actions
  • GitLab CI
  • Jenkins
  • CircleCI
  • Buildkite
  • Bitbucket Pipelines
  • Azure Pipelines
  • TeamCity
  • AppVeyor
  • Travis CI
  • AWS CodePipeline
For unsupported providers, you can set DD_GIT_COMMIT_SHA, DD_GIT_BRANCH, and DD_GIT_REPOSITORY_URL manually.

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Enabling CI Visibility

1

Install dd-trace

npm install --save-dev dd-trace
2

Set environment variables

Point the tracer at your Datadog Agent and identify your service:
DD_ENV=ci \
DD_SERVICE=my-test-suite \
DD_CIVISIBILITY_ENABLED=true \
node --require dd-trace/ci/init jest
The dd-trace/ci/init require hook configures the tracer specifically for CI test runs.
3

Or enable agentless mode

If your CI environment does not have a Datadog Agent, use agentless mode to send data directly to Datadog:
DD_ENV=ci \
DD_SERVICE=my-test-suite \
DD_CIVISIBILITY_AGENTLESS_ENABLED=true \
DD_API_KEY=<your-api-key> \
DD_SITE=datadoghq.com \
node --require dd-trace/ci/init jest
The dd-trace/ci/init require hook is the recommended way to enable CI Visibility. It automatically disables APM tracing and configures the tracer for test-only data collection.

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Configuration

Environment variableDefaultDescription
DD_CIVISIBILITY_ENABLEDfalseEnable CI Visibility
DD_CIVISIBILITY_AGENTLESS_ENABLEDfalseSend data directly to Datadog (no Agent required)
DD_CIVISIBILITY_ITR_ENABLEDtrueEnable Intelligent Test Runner (skip unaffected tests)
DD_CIVISIBILITY_LOG_LEVELwarnLog level for CI Visibility output
DD_API_KEY—Datadog API key (required for agentless mode)
DD_SITEdatadoghq.comDatadog site
DD_SERVICE—Service name (test suite name)
DD_ENV—Environment name (e.g., ci)

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Intelligent Test Runner

The Intelligent Test Runner (ITR) skips tests that are not affected by a given code change, reducing CI time. When ITR is enabled, dd-trace queries Datadog for the list of relevant tests based on the current commit’s diff and runs only those tests. ITR is enabled by default when CI Visibility is active. To disable it: 
DD_CIVISIBILITY_ITR_ENABLED=false

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Early Flake Detection

Early Flake Detection automatically identifies newly added tests that behave inconsistently (flaky). When a new test is detected, dd-trace runs it multiple times in the same CI job and marks it as flaky if it does not produce consistent results. This prevents flaky tests from being merged.

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Flaky test management

Known flaky tests can be quarantined from the Datadog UI. Quarantined tests are still executed, but their results do not block the pipeline. This gives teams time to fix flaky tests without blocking deployments.

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Adding custom tags to test runs

You can add custom tags to the active test span using the dd-trace public API: 
const tracer = require('dd-trace')

// In a beforeEach or test setup hook
const testSpan = tracer.scope().active()
if (testSpan) {
  testSpan.setTag('custom.team', 'platform')
  testSpan.setTag('custom.feature', 'auth')
}

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Manual API

For advanced use cases, CI Visibility exposes a manual testing API at dd-trace/ci/jest/manual-reporter that lets you record test results programmatically — useful for custom test runners or test frameworks not natively supported by dd-trace.

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