A sound tagging strategy is key to the success of any cloud transformation, regardless of the tools and platforms chosen by your company. Knowing which tags are important, which are mandatory, and which are nice to have, will make your cloud journey infinitely more scalable across all modern platforms your team adopts.
The importance of tagging in the cloud is something that any seasoned SRE or DevOps engineer can attest to. Our engineers have years of experience in advising customers on which tags are important, how to use them, and how to automatically generate and consume them.
Manually creating tags is one of the biggest mistakes customers make in their journey into the cloud, and our team is experienced in guiding customers through the challenges of automating tag creation using cloud templates. Datadog is no different, and a good tagging strategy is essential to harvest the power of the Datadog platform.
Datadog uses tags to help optimize the consumption of time-series metrics on the platform, as well as correlate data across the infrastructure, APM, and logging pillars of the platform. Tags on the Datadog platform should be focused on both Business tags and Engineering tags, allowing your users to consume data on the granular level as well as the business level. Such business related tags can include business units, application data, financial data, and other non-engineering metrics.
Our experience helping hundreds of organizations go through this workshops has helped us derive a list of about 50 tags that have become essential to the success of our Datadog customers.
The exact approach to Datadog implementations for your company depends on the types and amounts of infrastructure you’re running. You can leverage our team for quick or extended engagements, ensuring you get the most out of Datadog on a timeline that makes sense for you.
Our Tagging Strategy engagement is based on a remote workshop designed to help you identify and create new tags effectively consume your metrics throughout the Datadog platform. You will be able to:
Derive new business tags that describe your applications structure & operations. These tags are designed to:
• Track cost across organizations
• Monitor user behavior on your ecommerce applications
• Identify top-performing SKU’s or Pages on your applications
• Dynamically route monitors and alerts to the correct teams
• Roll-up application performance and cost at the leadership level
• Identify SLA’s and SLO’s at the leadership level
Derive new engineering tags from your existing tagging methods or newly developed methods, including:
• Leveraging existing configuration tags
• Obtaining new tags from current tech stacks
• Identifying a scalable tagging strategy for future Datadog application roll-outs
• Map your infrastructure with your collected tags
• Categorize services by function and responsible teams
• Unify data streams to pivot between service metrics, logs and request traces
• Assign owners to services and build informative alerts that automatically route notifications to teams
Looking to learn more about our solutions? Or just chat DevOps? We’d be happy to jump on a call and see how we can help you and your organization move faster.
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