We spent an eye-opening week at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas last month: meeting cutting edge AWS users, speaking with the Amazon team, and our Director of Technical Operations Mike Fiedler delivered a presentation entitled “Instrumenting Application Stacks in a Dynamically Scaling Environment”.

In the video embedded below, Mike explains why gaining visibility into an application stack’s performance is necessary to understand how the stack is running and why instrumenting these components is challenging in a dynamically scaling environment. Mike then jumps into a technical demonstration of how to remove manual steps in producing data from an elastically scaling cloud stack by auto-instrumenting hosts for graphing and alerting.

If you’d like to get the visibility into the metrics graphs that Mike shows off when observing different systems he’s describing, sign-up for a free trial of Datadog.

Enjoy the presentation, and special thanks to Amazon Web Services for putting on a great show: