Monitoring backend signals has been standard practice for years, and tech companies have been alerting their SRE and software engineers when API endpoints are failing. But when you’re alerted about a backend issue, it’s often your end users who are directly affected. Shouldn’t we observe and alert on this user experience issues early on? As frontend monitoring is a newer practice, companies often struggle to identify signals that can help them pinpoint user frustrations or performance problems.

In 2018 Datadog released Watchdog to proactively detect anomalies on your observability data. But what defines an anomaly? How do you avoid false positives? At Datadog Summit London 2024, Nils Bunge, product manager at Datadog, shared the story of the creation of the first Datadog AI feature (Watchdog Alert), what we learned from it and how we applied those lessons to all the added AI functionalities across the years.

We’re celebrating 25 years of excellence in IT management 🌟 Let’s take a look at our journey from humble beginnings in 1999 to global operations today. SolarWinds is proud of our legacy and excited for the future. 🚀 Here’s to the next 25 years.