Watchdog is Datadog’s machine learning and AI engine, which leverages algorithms like anomaly detection to automatically surface performance issues in your infrastructure and applications. Without any manual setup or configuration, Watchdog generates a feed of Alerts—on anomalies such as latency spikes, elevated error rates, and network issues in cloud providers—to help you reduce your mean time to detection.

HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) provides fully managed versions of some of HashiCorp’s most popular offerings, including Vault. With Vault, users have a centralized way to secure, store, and manage access to secrets across distributed systems. HCP Vault handles the day-to-day cluster maintenance, patches, and overall system security, making it easy to deploy a cluster without needing to host or manage your own infrastructure.

A Webhook is an API that delivers data from applications when an action or event occurs. When an event is triggered within the source site, it is seen by the Webhook, which collects the data and sends it to the desired application or URL in the form of an HTTP request. Webhooks are also instant, triggering the delivery of data in real-time, this makes them faster and easier to implement than other methods, like polling.

When running and maintaining an application in a production environment, we want to feel confident about the behavior of the application and know when it isn’t working as expected. At the least, we want to track errors, monitor performance, and collect specific metrics throughout the application.

Say you've been tasked with monitoring an application, so you set up some alerts to let you know when errors are coming in. The minutes roll by, the errors start coming... ...and they don't stop coming... Oh my, there seems to be quite a few errors coming through. Alerting on each error isn't going to help, better report on changes in the error rate instead right? Not quite. While there's no shortage of vendors that'll sell you on the benefits of error rate alerting, you need to get back to basics first.