Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Distributed AI training workloads impose complex scheduling requirements that Kubernetes’s built-in scheduler can’t meet. Kubernetes schedules pods individually and independently, but distributed training introduces two requirements that break this model: Pods must land on hardware with the right inter-GPU bandwidth, and all pods must be scheduled simultaneously. If either requirement goes unmet, training stalls or runs far below the hardware’s potential.

AI coding tools such as Cursor are becoming a significant source of engineering spend. But Cursor costs can be difficult for FinOps teams to manage. Cursor’s usage data alone doesn’t tell you how costs break down across users and models, and fixed-threshold alerts may not catch an unusual cost spike if spend remains below the threshold. Datadog Cloud Cost Management (CCM) brings Cursor costs into the same place where you monitor cloud, SaaS, and other AI spend.

A platform engineering team can design robust Golden Paths for agent use yet still be unprepared for what happens after adoption. An agent may authenticate properly, call the correct tools, adhere to approval gates, and complete tasks without incident, but new operational risks arise once multiple teams begin running agents continuously and in parallel. We’ve encountered these risks firsthand at Datadog.

Datadog has been named the Company to Beat for observability platforms in the August 2026 Gartner AI Vendor Race research. Datadog has also been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms for the sixth consecutive year. We believe that these recognitions reflect what we have been building toward for more than a decade: a single platform where teams can observe, secure, and act on everything that matters across their technology stack.

NetFlow is a popular network protocol for collecting metadata about traffic flows across your environment so that it can be exported for analysis and monitoring. One of the most common issues that users encounter is NetFlow duplication, which occurs when identical flow records from the same conversation are recorded from different sources. Flow duplication inflates traffic data, undermining capacity planning and making top-talker rankings unreliable.

ChatGPT Work has become a common starting point for data and product teams. Analysts open it to compare launch adoption across segments, diagnose a metric that moved overnight, or turn a week of scattered numbers into a readout that a leader can act on. But the moment teams ask whether their experiment actually caused an effect they’ve observed, the conversation stalls.

When Datadog acquires a company, we usually rebuild the product rather than plugging it in as is. That’s exactly what we did with Eppo, an experimentation and feature-management platform. Eppo’s feature-management capabilities became Datadog Feature Flags, while experimentation became Datadog Experiments. This post focuses on the experimentation platform and four changes we made to help you get to a decision faster.

Kafka is a crucial and widely used technology: 80% of the Fortune 100 rely on the event streaming platform as part of their stack, according to Apache. But Kafka issues can be complex to manage and even more difficult to troubleshoot, as the same symptom can point to very different problems. Suppose consumer lag on your checkout-events topic suddenly exceeds its SLA.

As teams rush to adopt AI, they often find themselves with conflicting workflows unique to each individual developer. To manage costs and promote good development practices, organizations need to establish Golden Paths around AI usage. AI Golden Paths are standardized flows that help developers work with agents more reliably and effectively. But how do you sift through all the possible workflows to decide what these Golden Paths should be?

Launches are high-stakes moments for product managers (PMs), but understanding how a new product or feature is performing can be difficult. Teams may lack the instrumentation they need to track performance, or they may miss defects that affect specific user segments during QA.

Teams use AI coding agents and Bits Chat to troubleshoot systems and handle complex tasks, often uncovering repetitive work worth automating. But turning those routines into workflows can still require switching tools and recreating context manually. Through the Datadog MCP Server, Workflow Automation now lets you build workflows from Bits Chat or AI coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex.

Datadog’s 2026 State of AI Engineering report showed organizations’ LLM inputs swelling rapidly as context engineering expands. In March 2026, 69% of all input tokens in Datadog customer traces were for system prompts: internal instructions, policy definitions, and tool guidance providing context and guardrails around the user input. This suggests that most context engineering spend among Datadog customers is going toward optimizing repeating system prompts in heavily scaffolded agent systems.

Let’s say your team shipped a support agent last quarter. The launch demo went well, stakeholders were pleased, and everyone moved on. A few months later, things start to look off. Summaries of long conversations are truncated, and monitors show latency spikes on tool calls to the billing API. Your team’s first instinct is to ship fixes such as tweaking prompts or upgrading the model.

CUPED (Controlled-experiment Using Pre-Experiment Data) is a powerful tool that can reduce metric variance and help teams obtain precise experiment results with less data. However, the difference between an experiment’s CUPED-adjusted lift and raw lift can be difficult to explain, especially when an experiment uses many pre-exposure metrics and subject properties. The CUPED adjustments visualization in Datadog Experiments breaks the difference into a sequence of specific adjustments.