How Blameless Integrates with Datadog

Blameless is excited to announce a new source for monitoring data for your SLIs and SLOs. Datadog is a monitoring and security platform for cloud applications. It brings together end-to-end traces, metrics, and logs to make applications, infrastructure, and third-party services observable.

How Datadog integrates with SLOs

As a leading provider of monitoring, Datadog is a preferred integration for Blameless’ SLO Manager. The SLO Manager is a new service added to the Blameless platform. This service helps SRE and engineering teams proactively make data-driven decisions about reliability efforts.

With Blameless’ SLO Manager, teams can create distinct user journeys that correspond to their services. Teams will use these user journeys to craft SLIs, or service level indicators. These SLIs pull metrics from Datadog and display the services performance by using the calculation of good events/valid events for a particular criteria.

The integration with Datadog allows teams to monitor how they are performing against their service level objectives (SLO) on any metrics captured in their DataDog monitoring system. Users journeys are created in Blameless to monitor SLOs against multiple SLIs mapped to the appropriate Datadog metrics, serving as a signal for when to create an incident within Blameless based on the depleted error budget. 

Here’s how teams can integrate Datadog and Blameless.

Adding Datadog to your Blameless account

1. Follow the instructions located in the Datadog link here. You will need to copy those keys to the Blameless / Datadog Integration panel.
2. Go to the Integration > Metrics in your Blameless’ web application settings window. Paste the saved values into the Datadog integration settings panel and click on the “Enable Datadog” slider.
3. Click “Save.”
   

Additional Datadog API reference material is available in the [Datadog API Reference page]. (https://docs.datadoghq.com/api/)

Testing your Datadog integration

1. Select the SLO Manager portal icon (target) on the Blameless web application navigation menu.
2. Create and define a user journey in the Blameless web application which starts a setup wizard
3. Click “Next” button and click the “Create a new SLI” button
4. Define the SLI name and description (optional)
5. Click on the Latency option (SLI type)
6. Click on the “Datadog” button under the Select Data Source label to choose Datadog as the datasource.
7. Copy and paste the Datadog Latency metric from into the Blameless SLO Latency.
8. Complete the steps to create the SLO and click “Save.”

To learn more about how to integrate with Datadog, see this link here. And if you want to learn more about Blameless SLOs, check out this blog post.