Editor's top Datadog books
1Observability Engineering
Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones & George Miranda · O'Reilly · 631 pages · ~16 hrs to read
No dedicated Datadog book covers the platform as well as this covers the discipline it belongs to. Majors and Fong-Jones make the case for high-cardinality structured events over dashboards — read this to use Datadog's APM and tracing features like an observability tool, not just an expensive dashboard.
Datadog Books for Beginners
1Practical Monitoring
Mike Julian · O'Reilly · 169 pages · ~4 hrs to read
Vendor-neutral monitoring fundamentals — what to alert on, how to avoid noisy pages — that transfer directly to designing sane Datadog monitors and SLOs instead of copy-pasting default thresholds.
Intermediate & Advanced Datadog Books
4Datadog Cloud Monitoring Quick Start Guide
Thomas Kurian Theakanath · Packt
A short Packt guide to getting started with Datadog monitoring. Suited to engineers who want an orientation to the platform before reading the vendor documentation in depth.
Cloud-Native Observability with OpenTelemetry
Alex Boten · Packt · 386 pages · ~10 hrs to read
Pairs naturally with Datadog — OpenTelemetry is increasingly how instrumentation data flows into Datadog in modern architectures. This book explains the vendor-neutral instrumentation layer that feeds platforms like Datadog. Engineers who understand OTel alongside Datadog can architect observability systems that aren't locked to a single vendor.
Observability Engineering
Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones & George Miranda · O'Reilly · 631 pages · ~16 hrs to read
No dedicated Datadog book covers the platform as well as this covers the discipline it belongs to. Majors and Fong-Jones make the case for high-cardinality structured events over dashboards — read this to use Datadog's APM and tracing features like an observability tool, not just an expensive dashboard.
Site Reliability Engineering
Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff & Niall Richard Murphy · O'Reilly · 529 pages · ~13 hrs to read
The book that defined error budgets and SLOs, both of which are first-class Datadog product features today. Understanding the philosophy behind the feature makes you far better at configuring it than reading the Datadog docs alone.
Datadog resources