Datadog
Monitors, SLOs & Alerting
Turn signals into alerts that page the right people and track service-level objectives.
A monitor in Datadog is a saved query plus a condition that evaluates continuously and changes state (OK, Warn, Alert, No Data). Monitor types cover metrics, logs, APM, anomalies, forecasts, outliers, and composite logic, so you can alert on a threshold, a sudden change, or a predicted breach. Notifications route through integrations (PagerDuty, Slack, email) using template variables and tag-based routing.
A smoke detector tuned to actual fires, not toast. And a monthly "budget" of allowed alarms — once you have used too many too fast, you know to stop shipping risky changes.
Key Concepts
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On top of monitors, SLOs let you express reliability as a target — e.g. 99.9% of requests succeed over 30 days — backed by either metric ratios or monitor uptime. The remaining error budget tells you how much failure you can still absorb, which turns alerting from "something is wrong" into "are we spending reliability faster than allowed". Good alerting minimises noise: alert on symptoms users feel, not every underlying cause.