Well, we hyped up DASH 2025

If you missed our hype, here’s that.

This year certainly did not disappoint. Being on the floor talking to current and potential Datadog users as well as all of the friends we’ve made over the years is always a blast, but this year Datadog really kicked things off with a bang.

Usually, the Keynote presentation for the upcoming features is on the second day of the conference and in the early afternoon. This year, it was first thing on the first day which set a really positive tone for the rest of the event. You could really tell that people were amped up after all of these announcements, including ourselves.

And some announcements were, indeed. Quantity wise it was certainly way more than some - you can find the full list here, but we figured we’d break out a few of our personal favorites for you.

Bits AI SRE Agent and More

Let’s get the big one out of the way - Bits AI is an incredibly impressive offering from Datadog that was the subject of a lot of conversation on the floor. Something that came up frequently during these conversations was “how is this any different from AIToolXYZ that’s already out?” and that’s not an unfair question. Well, the thing is - most of those tools are pulling down aggregate data from observability APIs and then throwing it at something like OpenAI. Bits AI is built by Datadog, for Datadog, using incredibly clean and diverse source data from Datadog. It is absolutely in a league of its own in that regard.

Bits AI has already been around for a little while, showing items like anomalies in data and allowing for investigations with natural language. But this next iteration really puts a few cans of RedBull into Bits’ water bowl. We can’t wait to see how this plays out. Collecting data is the easy part, knowing how to sort through it and understand it in an active production incident is a different one. With Bits AI, we’re hoping that some on-call engineers can rest easier and companies can recover faster.

Datadog Sheets

Compared to the last section, this one probably isn’t as exciting for most people, but it’s providing an answer to a big ask that we get hit with frequently. “How can I export my Datadog data into Excel” comes up quite frequently, as many people are extremely familiar with Excel and not as much with Datadog when it comes to non-engineers. Datadog sheets now builds in this layer of familiarity to bring the power of Datadogs data to people that want to work with it in different ways. There’s not much more to say about this one, but I’m happy to finally have an answer for people.

Flex Frozen Logs

Flex logs was a fairly recent addition to Datadog, allowing for colder storage of logs for up to 15 months. For some organizations, this still isn’t enough time for compliance reasons. The good news is that you have also been able to archive logs to S3 or Azure Blob or otherwise for quite some time, but what if you don’t have a cloud presence at all? No one is going to go setup an AWS account just for an S3 bucket for log archiving, especially when they are concerned with various compliance frameworks. Well, problem solved! Flex Frozen allows for 7 years of log retention, without having to worry about where they’re kept or how to secure them properly. 

End User Device Monitoring

Here’s one that was a little bit of a curveball I wasn’t expecting, but is also a significant part of enterprise operations. With this feature, IT teams will now be able to understand proactive actions they can take for end users, such as knowing when a good old fashioned Blue Screen of Death occurs, or how wifi is performing for end user devices. This has been asked for many times as well, but the cost of the standard Datadog agent for the value that it would provide in its general form was always a prohibitive factor for most organizations. This should be a big improvement for larger orgs, and while most Datadog users probably wont care too much, it is a big win for many IT teams.

Vega-Lite Widgets

This is something that has been in preview for a while now that I have used successfully many times to produce visualizations that aren’t native to Datadog. The platform has always had pretty much everything you need to visualize your data appropriately, but there are always times where you need to do more. In the preview version, the other difficulty was that you were pretty much left to work your way through the Vega-Lite schema and bang your head against your keyboard until you got it right. With the full release, there's now assistance within the UI with common patterns that will help you get your visualizations looking how you want them in a much faster manner. 

Alert Routing Rules

Datadog alerting has always been powerful, allowing you to create one monitor that will alert over many many instances at once with the multi-alert feature. Using dynamic handles has been around for a long time, but if you’re trying to send to different email groups with different domains and such, it was flaky without a clear cut case. If you didn’t want to do that, you were basically stuck with creating specific alerts for specific services to send to specific people, which defeats the purpose of multi-alerts in a lot of cases. But no more! Now you can create routing criteria based on specific tag values and send them around to your hearts content. This is an amazing quality of life update.

There’s So Much More

Admittedly, we’re still catching up on all of the new announcements as well as finding the best ways to implement them across our customers' environments. 

Want to talk more? Get in touch with us - sales@nobs.tech