If the Datadog agent or client libraries do not detect a configured API key, they will skip sending metrics, logs, and events. This results in a silent failure of observability reporting, often visible only through startup log messages.
\- Datadog Cluster Agent fails to register its CWS (Container Workload Security) instrumentation webhook when running in `remote_copy` mode without a configured service account.
\- The Datadog Agent is unable to scrape metrics from an OpenMetrics endpoint, returning a 404 Not Found error.