2020 Workshops

Modern applications are deployed across multiple systems. Without proper observability in place, it can be difficult to pinpoint where problems occur.

In this workshop, we’ll instrument and then fix a broken microservices web application using Datadog APM and distributed tracing. With the application now working as expected, you’ll pinpoint performance degradations and deploy updates that ensure it’s running optimally.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Datadog’s APM gives critical insight to the performance of your microservices. In this workshop, we’ll discover how to instrument your monolithic applications before migrating to microservices, so you can quantify the performance and process benefits from the switch. You’ll walk away with an understanding for how distributed tracing can be used to showcase both the performance and systems improvements across your teams.

Skill Level: Intermediate

In this advanced-level workshop, attendees will design, build, and deploy a functioning Datadog integration. We’ll start with a quick overview of the basics and then move on to a guided assignment. The goals are to design, code, and test a real integration that interacts with a well-known service. Attendees are expected to be familiar with Python, APIs, and development tooling in general; novice developers are encouraged to attend the Intro to building a Datadog integration workshop.

Skill Level: Advanced

In this introductory-level workshop, attendees will design, build, and deploy a functioning Datadog integration. The goals are to learn about the design principles, configuration elements, and tooling for integrations, as well as to facilitate and encourage community members to create their own projects. Attendees should have basic familiarity with Python and git; however, this workshop is accessible to those who are relatively new to development.

Skill Level: Beginner

Metrics, Dashboards, Traces, Synthetics, and more. If you are just getting introduced to Datadog, the tools and technologies can be overwhelming. It is hard to know where to start when working with the product for the first time. This is especially true if you are trying to solve problems at the same time with your application. In this workshop we will throw you in at the deep end. We are experiencing an outage of our ecommerce app and we need your help to solve it. We will use metrics and dashboards to get an overall feel of what's going on. Then go deeper with traces and logs to figure out specifics. We will even look at the end user’s perspective using synthetics and real user monitoring. With your help we will get past this outage and get to sleep at a normal hour.

Skill Level: Beginner

Take your knowledge to the next level—whether you just started using Datadog in the last few months, or you just want to adopt Datadog for more use cases. Learn when and how to use Dashboards, Notebooks, Monitors, APIs, Graphing, and Tagging.

We’ll discuss building Runbooks into your workflows, automated Dashboard & Monitor creation, Executive Dashboards, and general tips and tricks. We’ll also go over building training material for new users onboarding.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Moving your containerised applications to Kubernetes can have many advantages: from auto-healing of errors and easy rollbacks to auto-scaling of workloads and simplified deployments. This flexibility adds more operational complexity, so having a good observability strategy becomes even more critical. Errors can now come from many different places: one of the services, the interfaces between services, or even the network.

In this workshop we will deploy an application on Kubernetes and use Datadog to troubleshoot real-world issues, find the root causes, fix the issues, and get the application back to a stable state.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Containers and orchestration promise greater resource efficiency and simplified deployments. Developers provide code in the form of a container, define their required resources for operation, and the orchestrator does the rest. Sounds easy, but if your workloads are dynamic in nature, how can you ensure sufficient resources to meet the performance and availability requirements of your customers?

In this workshop we will demonstrate how to autoscale your application workloads on Kubernetes. You will learn frameworks for how to identify their key work and resource metrics; as well as how to use them to drive horizontal and vertical pod autoscaling so that you can maximize efficiency, while ensuring service reliability.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Your logs are key to enhancing APM traces, providing metrics, detecting potential security threats, and maintaining regulatory compliance. Getting the full value from your logs requires more than just collecting and analyzing log lines. With this hands-on workshop, you’ll get up and running with logging in a real world application, to see the value logs can bring. Attendees will leave knowing how to configure and ship logs to Datadog, how to process them efficiently, and ensuring you are maximizing the value logs can bring to understanding your applications and infrastructure.

Skill Level: Beginner

Building your applications on serverless allows your organization to move fast and focus on delivering value to your customers. But what do observability and operations for your applications look like when much of the infrastructure is abstracted away? In this course, designed for beginners to serverless, we’ll build a Node.js AWS Lambda microservice into an existing application to solve the real-world ecommerce use case of customers abandoning their shopping carts before checkout.

Attendees will learn how to build serverless microservices, automate deployments, and gain observability into your applications by combining custom business metrics, traces, and logs in Datadog. You’ll leave this workshop with the confidence and tools you need to build your first production-ready serverless applications.

Skill Level: Beginner

Uptime is a poor measure of reliability. Agile development’s fail-fast approach coupled with distributed applications and dynamic infrastructure requires us to have a better understanding of reliability.

Service level objectives (SLOs) help you understand the true health of your systems and how your end users experience them. Poorly defined SLOs mean that you are making decisions based on unhelpful data, which could cause worse outcomes for your users.

In this workshop we’ll cover how SLOs help you make more informed decisions and minimize risks. You’ll learn how to define SLOs and choose the right service level indicators to ensure reliability. We'll cover best practices on reporting and using SLOs across an organization. Armed with this information, we'll introduce chaos into a sample application and learn how to respond effectively using error budgets, and demonstrate the new features that we have been working on since SLO was introduced last year!

Skill Level: Beginner

With the growing complexity and velocity of security threats in dynamic, cloud-native environments, it’s more important than ever for security teams to have the same visibility into their infrastructure, network, and applications that developers and operations do. Conversely, as developers and operations become responsible for securing their services, they need their monitoring platform to help surface possible threats.

In this workshop, attendees will analyze application and infrastructural code, implement observability best practices, and troubleshoot a live environment using Datadog Security Monitoring. The goals are to identify problem areas in a vulnerable application stack, integrate monitoring and observability tooling, write custom threat detection rules, and build efficient visualizations and dashboards. Attendees will leave with real-world experience detecting and remediating security issues in production applications while under siege. Some experience modifying and deploying production applications in containerized environments is required.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Everything appears to be running smoothly with your web application, but then you begin seeing a few tickets rolling in from users about errors that you’re unable to replicate. A classic “it works on my machine” dilemma. Instead of digging around in our codebase, we can capture telemetry from an end user’s perspective to get a detailed view of the user journey. Utilizing this data we’ll create monitors and service-level objectives (SLOs) so we’ll be able to take the guesswork out of solving issues in the future.

This workshop is designed for attendees new to web performance observability. We will learn how to set up API and browser tests on key portions of an application, and define targets in order to meet business expectations. We will also set up real user monitoring (RUM), learn how to identify the most-visited portions of an application, surface user demographics, and prioritize where to invest to improve end-user performance.

Skill Level: Beginner

The leading causes of most incidents and software regressions are changes created in the environment. This is increasingly true as software becomes more complex and organizations scale. There are more pieces to track, and teams split then specialize - losing context on how to validate the full stack of an application along the way. This complexity and growth results in fear of deployment that slows down an organization’s velocity. In this workshop we will discuss a number of techniques and strategies for regaining confidence in deployments and changes, so that you can move fast without negatively impacting customers and production services.

Topics covered will include:

• Using monitoring driven development approaches to bring observability earlier into your development cycles
• Canary deployments and rollbacks
• Creating feedback loops that enable you to catch regressions before your customers are impacted

Skill Level: Intermediate

In this interactive AWS Security GameDay, attendees will use Datadog's Security Monitoring product to discover and prevent common hacking attacks in a live AWS environment.

Attendees will be dropped into a live AWS environment, with attacks occurring in real time on their infrastructure. By leveraging Datadog, attendees will learn how Security Monitoring and logging can help discover potential security attacks, and see whether or not actions taken have prevented continued attacks.

Included scenarios address access to databases, S3 buckets, and a vulnerable web application. Attendees should have some familiarity with AWS environments and the console.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Today, legacy and modern applications are deployed across a number of heterogeneous environments and with that, comes the challenge of having consistent tooling and observability for those applications. What if you could have a consistent solution for on-premises AND in public cloud while having a single pane of glass for observability? In this workshop, users will learn the benefits of deploying agnostic web servers, load balancers, reverse proxies, and API GW's, all the while having end-to-end visibility and ensuring service reliability.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Kubernetes is a scheduling framework that makes it easier for teams to run and manage their containerized applications. But how do you keep track of all your applications, and ensure things are running as expected? Tools like Datadog make it easy to view your metrics, but how might you go about setting up standards and observability in a consistent way? This workshop will demonstrate how organizations can implement observability principles and practices throughout their environments. From provisioning to production, we’ll discuss how to leverage several providers that help to ensure that new applications are created consistently, reliably, and declaratively.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Learn how you can use your observability and monitoring to protect your organization from data breaches. In this workshop, we will dive into a few famous data breaches, and show you how you, as a non-security engineer, can use a new open source project called Approzium. We’ll walk through migrating credentials out of your application and removing the application's direct access to those credentials. We’ll then show the advanced logging and tracing while using Approzium, allowing for better observability including being able to pinpoint exactly which of your individual services are connecting to your databases. From there we’ll push all of those logs to Datadogs for further analysis and consolidation of logging across your full stack. You will then be set up to track all sensitive data activity, and be able to pinpoint any exfiltration activity.

Skill Level: Intermediate

During this two-hour workshop, attendees will be broken up into teams of four, and each assigned a role that is critical to the Chaos Engineering Experiment process. You’ll work together as a team to plan and execute various Chaos Engineering experiments with the guidance of the Gremlin Team. We'll monitor each experiments progress using Datadog dashboards.

- We’ll cover the tools, practices, and metrics you need to implement Chaos Engineering in your organization.
- Even if you’re already using Chaos Engineering, you’ll learn to identify new ways to use Chaos Engineering within your engineering organization.
- Discover how other companies are using Chaos Engineering and the positive results they have had using chaos to create reliable distributed systems

Skill Level: Intermediate