Datadog customers send trillions of data points per day. These data points are processed by Datadog and used to debug production issues in real time. But, in order to reason about all this data, we humans need visual representations. Visualizations can help us discover connections and problem points.

In this session Ara Pulido, Technical Evangelist, chats with Mark Hintz, Data Visualization Engineering Team Lead, and Kemper Smith, Data Visualization Design Team Lead, about Data Visualization, how engineering and design collaborate to create new visualizations, and how visualization widgets are built and rendered. They also share some practical tips on visualizations that are available in Datadog that you may not know about.

By the end of the session you’ll understand what type of visualizations are best suited depending on the problem you are trying to solve, and what decisions are being made at Datadog when introducing new visualizations, along with some antipatterns when designing with data visualizations.

00:00 - Introduction

03:41 - Data Visualization & Observability

11:16 - Different types of visualizations

18:50 - Process to add a new visualization to Datadog

23:52 - Designing a new visualization

31:06 - Technical Architecture

42:06 - Practical tips

46:26 - Q&A

Data Visualization Resources mentioned in the episode:

From data to Viz | Find the graphic you need: https://www.data-to-viz.com/
D3.js - Data-Driven Documents: https://d3js.org/
Fullstack D3 and Data Visualization, by Amelia Wattenberger
The Grammar of Graphics, by Leland Wilkinson