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My First DataDog Summit (London 2025)

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Today I attended my first DataDog Summit.

It was interesting, but at times, it felt like a bit of a slog. Registration began at 9am, and by 10am, we were in the main auditorium for two and a half hours straight - eight back-to-back 15 minute sessions with no breaks.

The sessions were a mixture of introductions, customer experience and DataDog features. Of course the DataDog feature talks were just a little bit salesy and DataDog give the impression they think they’re the answer to everything, but it wasn’t too bad. The customer experience talks were really interesting, especially those from NatWest, WTW (big in insurance apparently) and the London Stock Exchange. It was good to see other organisations solving similar problems to my current employer and that we’re ahead of most.

The new (to me) DataDog features were also interesting. I didn’t know that data into DataDog wasn’t just a one way flow. DataDog can also be configured to adjust your infrastructure to save cost or mitigate unexpected jumps in traffic. There is also a new (to DataDog) feature which lets you add tags to help indicate what might be causing new errors after a deployment.

I like a nice long lunch at a conference. It gives me time to recharge. There was quite a varied and exceptionally healthy lunch offered too. Although I will admit to eating two chocolate mousses.

The afternoon was the choice of four workshops which each lasted 2 hours. I opted for the “Building Observability with Logs” workshop and although it was very basic, I was surprised how much I learnt. It’s going to be easier for me to do effective searches in DataDog now. I now know how to build dashboards and how to navigate the less than intuitive DataDog user interface. It’s not at AWS console proportions but there is some work to be done there. The 2 hours went surprisingly fast, especially the practical bits.

I skipped the networking as I had nothing to buy or sell and I don’t really like wine.

Overall it was an interesting and useful day. However, unless there was something specific I was interested in, I don’t think I would attend a DataDog Summit again. There also needs to be a break in that first session, although I appreciate it takes a while to get 1000 people out of a room and back in.


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