There were some big IT headlines this past year. Microsoft acquired GitHub and IBM bought Red Hat. Kubernetes graduated from the CNCF incubator program. And the biggest headline of all—at least to those of us at Datadog, where we live and breathe monitoring—we released Datadog Agent version 6, a completely new monitoring agent written in Go!
As we start the new year, we’d like to take a moment to recognize some of the incredible things our engineers accomplished in 2018.
Teaching Datadog some new tricks
In addition to completely rewriting the Datadog Agent, we added lots of new features to extend your visibility into the systems and applications you run.
Logs: The third pillar
We released Datadog log management and analytics in early 2018. Logs, when combined with metrics and traces (APM), provide the third pillar of observability. But what makes Datadog log management even more powerful is how well our engineers and UX teams have integrated it into the Datadog experience. Logs are collected by the Datadog Agent, so enabling log collection is as easy as making a small configuration change in your existing Agent installation. Once logs are enabled, you can click on a timeseries graph in Datadog to view related logs, and when you view a request trace in Datadog APM, you automatically have access to the logs related to that trace as well.
Throughout the year, we continued to innovate on log management. First we introduced Logging without Limits™, which gives you the ability to collect all of your logs, Live Tail them to see all of your log data immediately, and choose which logs to index later—giving you flexible cost-efficiency without sacrificing the visibility you need. We also introduced Log Patterns, which intelligently groups your logs in real time so you can quickly identify and investigate issues.
New APM languages and visualizations
We expanded our APM support to include Java and Node.js, allowing you to instrument even more applications. We also made beta releases of our .NET and PHP APM libraries, and both will move to full GA releases soon. When you start sending traces from your applications, you can use our new Service Map to instantly visualize how your services interact and find bottlenecks and dependency issues.
Finding the needle-in-the-haystack trace
Finding application bottlenecks and interrelated service issues became easier when we introduced App Analytics. Now you can filter and search your traces using high-cardinality tags such as customer IDs, transaction types, product SKUs, or any dimension that matters to your product and business.
Datadog for serverless
As more and more of our customers take advantage of serverless technologies, we wanted to ensure that you have the same visibility into serverless architectures that we’ve long provided for your servers, containers, applications, and cloud services. Our new Serverless view brings together all the metrics, traces, and logs from your serverless applications so you can monitor the performance, utilization, and resource consumption of your serverless functions.
Watchdog
Traditionally, you’ve had to manually create monitors to receive alerts. But often there are issues that you didn’t know to watch for. That’s why we launched Watchdog. Watchdog applies the machine learning that powers our industry-leading anomaly detection to your application metrics and automatically informs you of irregularities.
New ways to support you
We also opened a Datadog EU region, which allows our European customers to keep their monitoring, analytics, and log data in Europe.
If you need help learning how to use all of our new features, we launched the Datadog Learning Center—an online training portal to help you get the most out of Datadog.
Constantly improving
We didn’t just create new features last year. Every day, our engineers work with you, our customers, to find ways to make Datadog even better by helping you gain more context, evaluate information, and take action faster than ever before.
The Host Map is one of Datadog’s most beloved features, because it allows you to quickly see high-level patterns in your infrastructure and drill down to individual nodes. In order to accommodate ever larger infrastructure, we completely rewrote the Host Map using WebGL. We also added the Container Map to give you the same powerful interface for all of your containerized infrastructure.
We added lists and popularity to make it easier for you to find the dashboards you need. With lists, you can create a collection of dashboards related to a service or team. Popularity scores highlight the dashboards that others in your organization are using most.
We also made hundreds of smaller improvements, such as tags for monitors, so you can quickly filter to find the monitors applicable to your service, environment, and more; and an API endpoint, so you can programmatically manage and search your monitors. Together, these small changes add up to a big improvement in your experience and efficiency.
Spreading the monitoring love
One thing that attracts new users to Datadog is the number of integrations in our ecosystem. If there’s an application or service you use that needs monitoring, we probably have it covered. In 2018 we added even more and now have over 250 integrations! Our new integrations include cloud platforms like Pivotal Cloud Foundry, databases like Cockroach DB and Oracle, and security services like Aqua.
We also extended many of our existing integrations, such as adding support for Microsoft Azure’s Chinese, German, and Government regions; adding Amazon MQ and AWS health integrations; and providing an AWS Lambda Layer to simplify the process of monitoring your Lambda applications.
No stopping
These highlights are just a small sampling of the work we did in 2018. But as exciting as 2018 was, we have a lot more planned for 2019!
Datadog Synthetics has been in private beta for a few months and will soon be available publicly. And our .NET and PHP APM tracers will graduate from beta status soon.
If you don’t have a Datadog account, sign up for a free account and give our new features a try. If you are a Datadog user, you can keep up-to-date with the latest feature releases in the monthly customer newsletter and the release notes in Datadog.
