Explain the internal working of Datadog's remote configuration feature?

Each Agent maintains a persistent, authenticated connection (or regular polling cadence) to Datadog's remote configuration backend, checking for configuration updates that apply to it based on its own tags and current configuration state.

When an operator pushes a change - enabling a new product, updating APM sampling rules, or rolling out a security ruleset - through the UI, API, or a tool like Fleet Automation, that change is published as a signed configuration update targeted at the relevant scope of Agents, rather than requiring a new deployment artifact.

Agents receiving an applicable update validate its signature before applying it, which protects the update mechanism itself from being used to push unauthorized or tampered configuration to a fleet of Agents with wide infrastructure access.

Once validated, the Agent applies the change locally - often without needing a full restart for many configuration types - which is what allows near-real-time, staged rollouts across potentially thousands of hosts without coordinating a traditional deployment pipeline for what is, functionally, just a configuration change.

This same mechanism underlies capabilities like Fleet Automation's staged Agent upgrades and dynamically updated APM sampling or security rules, since all of them are, at the transport level, the same signed-update-plus-local-validation pattern applied to different kinds of configuration payloads.