Datadog Integration

Datadog is one of my favorite observability platforms. They offer a multitude of products, including APM, metrics, error tracking, log ingestion, and more. In addition, their suite of products continues to grow, replacing the need for a multitude of observability tools.

In 2020, I handled contract negotiation, initial deployment, and ongoing setup and training for a rapidly growing client.

Contract Negotiation

Although my client’s usage was relatively small, cost-efficiency was top of mind. As a result, I negotiated a plan that saved my client over 50% on their ongoing bill. I accomplished this by providing Datadog’s internal APM team with assistance debugging a complex problem that affected their Node.js APM users. You can learn more about this issue here.

Deployment

This particular client is a big believer in infrastructure-as-code, specifically utilizing AWS Cloud Development Kit. Therefore I deployed their Datadog integration via custom CDK code. I’ve since extracted this pattern into an open-source CDK package, cdk-datadog-integration. Anyone can use this package to quickly deploy the Datadog AWS integration using Datadog’s managed CloudFormation policies.

In addition to the initial deployment, I completed integrations with APM, metrics, error tracking (frontend and backend), log ingestion, synthetics monitoring, and more.

Training

An observability platform is only helpful if engineers feel comfortable using the product! In addition to initial infrastructure setup and configuration, I’ve led ongoing training sessions for this client’s engineering team. They’ve seen great adoption of the tool and have opted into new features as they’ve been released.

Freelance Services

Are you interested in deploying Datadog in your organization? I’d love to help! Learn more about my freelance services and reach out.