OOM-Kill Integration: clarify when kernel headers are Required to be Installed

[colinbjohnson]

Documentation Page

https://docs.datadoghq.com/integrations/oom-kill/

Issue Description

Within the OOM Kill documentation it is suggested that kernel-headers must be installed - this does not seem to be correct as 1) I have a distribution of Amazon Linux 2023 running ECS which is sending OOM Kills and have not installed kernel-devel and 2) claude states that if BTF is support built-in (which is as simple as checking for the file /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux) the kernel headers package is not required.

My own configuration is shown below

[root@ip-10-2-54-189 ~]# dnf list installed kernel-devel
Error: No matching Packages to list
[root@ip-10-2-54-189 ~]# dnf search kernel-headers
Last metadata expiration check: 1 day, 15:39:49 ago on Sat Jun 13 00:43:35 2026.
==================================================================================== Name Exactly Matched: kernel-headers ====================================================================================
kernel-headers.aarch64 : Header files for the Linux kernel for use by glibc

Suggestion

I would modify the section on installing kernel headers similar to the below:

In order to operate properly, the OOM Kill integration requires either that your kernel ships with BTF built in (shown in the table below, or confirmed by running ls /sys/kernel/btf/vmlinux) or that kernel headers are installed using the command shown in the Kernel Headers Install Command column.

┌───────────────────┬──────────────┬───────────────────────────────────────┐
│   Distribution    │ BTF Built-in │    Kernel Headers Install Command     │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Amazon Linux 2    │ No           │ yum install kernel-devel-$(uname -r)  │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Amazon Linux 2023 │ Yes          │ N/A                                   │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Debian 10         │ No           │ apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Debian 11+        │ Yes          │ N/A                                   │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ RHEL/CentOS 7/8   │ No           │ yum install kernel-devel-$(uname -r)  │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ RHEL/CentOS 9+    │ Yes          │ N/A                                   │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Ubuntu 18.04      │ No           │ apt install linux-headers-$(uname -r) │
├───────────────────┼──────────────┼───────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Ubuntu 20.04+     │ Yes          │ N/A                                   │
└───────────────────┴──────────────┴───────────────────────────────────────┘