Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In some organizations, high token counts have become a proxy for productivity. Some engineering teams are being pushed to max out context windows and wire in sprawling tool sets. More tokens can mean better agent reasoning and richer context during development, but token costs compound in production. Tokens accumulate across sessions, users, and tool calls in ways that are easy to overlook. Datadog’s 2026 State of AI Engineering report quantifies the scale of this problem.

As.NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) becomes the default cross-platform UI framework in the Microsoft ecosystem, many teams are standardizing on it to build mobile applications for iOS and Android. However, observability has not kept pace with the shift in adoption. Developers often rely on unsupported community bindings or maintain their own wrappers around native iOS and Android SDKs, which introduces instability and ongoing maintenance.

DASH 2026 brought thousands of engineers, builders, security professionals, and technology leaders to New York City for 2½ days focused on building, operating, and securing modern systems. Across hands-on sessions and more than 40 customer talks, teams shared how they’re tackling real-world challenges at scale with Datadog. On stage, the keynote set the direction for what’s next across observability, security, and AI, highlighting a shift toward more autonomous, AI-assisted operations.

Apple’s platform ecosystem is evolving as developers build production applications for watchOS and visionOS. Whether it’s a fitness app on Apple Watch or an immersive spatial computing experience on Apple Vision Pro, these platforms have moved beyond the experimental phase to support real users. Despite this growth in adoption, teams lack visibility into how their apps behave on these devices.

A lesson we’ve learned in experimentation at Datadog is how easy it is to fall into interpretative pitfalls even when following rigorous conventions. For example, consider an experimentation program that appears to do everything right on the surface.

At Datadog, we want our developers to become better at using AI tools with the end goal of building quality software, faster, that generates real value. This includes not only the products and features that our customers use, but also the internal tools that help keep our workflows running smoothly behind the scenes.

Engineering teams spend much of their incident response time investigating the problem and coordinating the response. Both tasks become harder when telemetry data lives in one place, deployment history is stored in another, and conversations unfold across chat channels and incident bridges. Responders often spend the first part of an incident rebuilding context before they can begin testing hypotheses and working toward resolution.

Off-the-shelf models are easy to deploy, but they are rarely enough to solve complex, domain-specific challenges in production. The key to sustained AI value is not in the models themselves but in the ability to tune, evaluate, and refine those models against your organization’s real-time signals. We are excited to announce that Adaptive ML is joining Datadog to accelerate this vision by combining our deep observability data with their expertise in building specialized, high-performance AI agents.

Developer experience, commonly known as DevEx, describes how an organization’s systems, workflows, tools, and culture affect developer productivity. A positive DevEx leads to tangible organizational benefits, including faster releases, increased innovation, and reduced technical debt. Measuring DevEx enables engineering management to quantify their team’s impact and understand where to direct improvement efforts.

Coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex CLI handle the coding parts of building an AI application well. The harder work comes after: understanding why a response went wrong, building eval sets that reflect real production behavior, and keeping up with an application that changes faster than any one-off script can. Teams spend 60–80% of their time on evaluation and error analysis, and much of that work needs to be redone every time the stack shifts.