In the last week of March 2024, Datadog hosted its latest Datadog Summit in London to celebrate our community. As Jeremy Garcia, Datadog’s VP of Technical Community and Open Source, mentioned during his welcome remarks, London is the first city that has seen two Datadog Summits, with the first one in 2018. It was great to be able to see how our community there has grown over the past six years.

Datadog Summit London included talks from Datadog product managers and our customers, hands-on workshops, product demos, and a couple of fun interactive challenges (AWS Gameday and CoTerm Battle)

You can watch the talks below or see the entire playlist here.

Leveraging observability for enhanced IoT development at Electrolux

Kicking off the day’s talks, Kristina Kondrashevich from Electrolux, shared the very interesting story of how her team introduced chaos engineering practices to Electrolux’s software engineering organization. Thanks to these techniques, teams started to own their own services in production, understand infrastructure related incidents, and resolve them faster.

Security at the speed of cloud

Securing applications in a world where we are releasing code to production several times per day can be overwhelming. Max Hedouin, senior product manager for App and API Protection at Datadog, shared how security, development, and operations teams need to collaborate and work together to be successful in this challenging task.

Serving up loyalty one dish at a time

Toli Apostolidis, principal software engineer at Flipdish, explained how Flipdish was able to deliver a full new product from scratch in just four months while also modernizing their technical stack and their team processes. He covered how a new way of organizing their teams was as important as any technical decision they made throughout the project.

And what about my user experience?

When monitoring applications, teams might start by covering their infrastructure and backend services. But your users interact with your application through your frontend services, so they are usually the first ones to find errors there. How can we improve this? Maël Lilensten of Datadog talked through some of the ways that Datadog frontend engineers use Datadog RUM products to improve the user experience of our customers.

Managing a complex distributed payment system across 185 locations and 110k of transactions per day

Devices on the edge represent a whole new set of problems when it comes to observability. Usman Niazi, head of SRE at Dunelm, shared how the company eliminated the blind spots they had in a third-party vendor application with a smart in-house solution involving AWS Lambda and Datadog.

What is an anomaly?

Is this an anomaly? This simple question started a lot of conversations during Datadog Principal Product Manager Nils Bunge’s talk. Nils explained how Datadog had to make some important decisions when designing Watchdog in 2017 to avoid false positives, and how they plan to improve it in the future.

Aviva’s journey to carbon net zero, one EC2 instance at a time

In March 2021, Aviva officially announced that the company aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. The first milestone on that journey is a 25 percent reduction in carbon intensity of assets by 2025. Leo Earl, cloud sustainability specialist at Aviva, shared very practical tips on how their engineering teams are using observability to identify waste and reduce the overall energy consumption of their infrastructure.

Thanks for coming

Thanks to everyone who came to Datadog Summit London, and thanks to everyone who shared their knowledge! We look forward to meeting you at a future summit if we missed you this time.