Having telemetry is all well and good—amazing, in fact. It’s easy to do: add some OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation libraries to your stack and they’ll fill your disks with data pretty quickly. However, having good telemetry data—data that’s curated into being useful—is something that is both cost-effective and represents good value.

If you've ever found yourself stuck in the midst of network connectivity issues, you know just how frustrating and isolating it can feel. But fear not! Today, we're embarking on a great network escape, where we'll explore the troubleshooting tips and tricks you need to break free from the clutches of network connectivity problems. So buckle up, grab your favourite caffeinated beverage, and let's get ready to navigate the twists and turns of the network maze together.

As networking environments grow increasingly complex, keeping pace presents an ongoing challenge for network managers. With more devices, users, and applications to account for, it’s now more critical than ever to have comprehensive visibility and understanding. The 2023 Network IT Management Report shows some progress in this area. Of IT professionals surveyed, 45% don’t have full knowledge of their network configurations, down from a whopping 57% in 2022.

If you’re new to IT, the “what is syslog?” question can get confusing fast because when someone says syslog, they might mean: And, frankly, it’s fair to use the word syslog for all of those. By the end of this article, you’ll understand why. This article will explain the syslog protocol in detail, including its definition, formats, best practices, and challenges.

In recent years, organizations have increasingly adopted service level objectives, or SLOs, as a fundamental part of their site reliability engineering (SRE) practice. Best practices around SLOs have been pioneered by Google—the Google SRE book and a webinar that we jointly hosted with Google both provide great introductions to this concept. In essence, SLOs are rooted in the idea that service reliability and user happiness go hand in hand.

Collaboration and communication are critical to the successful implementation of service level objectives. Development and operational teams need to evaluate the impact of their work against established service reliability targets in order to improve their end user experience. Datadog simplifies cross-team collaboration by enabling everyone in your organization to track, manage, and monitor the status of all of their SLOs and error budgets in one place.

Service level objectives, or SLOs, are a key part of the site reliability engineering toolkit. SLOs provide a framework for defining clear targets around application performance, which ultimately help teams provide a consistent customer experience, balance feature development with platform stability, and improve communication with internal and external users.