A clean recap of December’s NoBS Datadog Office Hour, covering real Datadog production issues, troubleshooting questions, and the answers shared live by our engineers.

Over the past few years, Datadog has introduced many strategies for log storage, but it’s pretty rare that we see many of these used effectively.

A wise man named Ice Cube once said “chickity-check yourself, before you wreck yourself.” If you’re not a fan of wrecking yourself, we’ve got something for you—the Reality Check, a brutally honest report of what’s going on in your Datadog and how to fix it…

Datadog Synthetic Monitoring is a powerful way to test uptime, API performance, and user flows — but without best practices, costs and SLOs can spiral fast. Here are practical tips on how to set up Datadog Synthetic tests the right way.

I-shaped. T-shaped. Π-shaped. Tree-shaped. Cute on paper. Useless when your stack is on fire. Observability doesn’t need specialists or generalists. It needs engineers who can tie systems together, learn fast, and make sense of chaos. At NoBS, we call them Arcane Engineers—and yes, Yog-Sothoth is involved.
This blog explains why.

Everyone loves to guess what SREs do—but most of them get it wrong. It’s not just about “keeping things up.” It’s about smarter observability, killing off useless toil, and reducing the chaos that wakes teams up at 3am. We wrote this piece to clear up the myths and share what modern SRE work actually looks like—messy, valuable, and mission-critical.

DASH 2025 certainly did not disappoint. Datadog dropped a pile of announcements right out of the gate. We figured we’d break out a few of our personal favorites for you.

Seems like there's a conference for everything, to the point where if you tried to attend all of them you would never get any work done. As an engineer, our time is valuable, and if we’re not gaining value in doing something then we shouldn’t be doing it.

Messy tagging slows down troubleshooting, clutters dashboards, and makes alerts unreliable. In Part 2, we’re tackling the biggest mistakes—over-tagging, inconsistent naming, and skipping Unified Service Tagging—plus how to fix them.

TL;DR: If your Datadog tags are messy, your observability is messy. Stop overcomplicating it—use layers, keep it practical, and only tag what matters.

Before we take the idea of observability and what it is off the rails, we should probably start with the boring definition of it just so we’re all on the same page.

Thanks for checking us out. We’re here because we’re done with BS in the tech and sales industries. We’re here to do things differently.