Useful links

Everything on this page is public. Your team’s own addresses and credentials (storefront hostname, kubeconfig, EpitaCard secrets) are in your welcome email and are not listed here.

Course tools

Datadog (EU1)Your team's organization. Always sign in on datadoghq.eu, not datadoghq.com.

GitLabYour team's repository, merge requests and pipelines.

EpitaCard merchant dashboardThe payment provider. Follow your team's payments with your team's dashboard login.

EpitaCard API referenceWhat billing sends to the provider, and the webhooks the provider sends back.

Datadog status (EU1)When data stops arriving, check here before you blame your stack.

Setup check scriptThe same check-setup.sh as in your repository. See Before session 1.

Datadog Learning Center

The Datadog Learning Center has free, on-demand courses, most with a hands-on lab. It is optional and not graded, but a one-hour course before a session makes the lab much faster.

How to use it

• Sign up on the Learning Center with any email address. This account is separate from your Datadog login.
• Each lab gives you a temporary Datadog account in a lab organization. Do the lab there, and keep your course work in your team’s organization. A separate browser profile for labs keeps the two from getting mixed up.
• Labs need Chrome or Firefox with third-party cookies and websockets enabled. Private windows block those cookies. If a lab does not load on the school network, try another network.
• An enrollment lasts 30 days. You can enroll again at any time and pick up where you left off.
• Start with The Learning Environment, a 15-minute course on how the labs work. Most courses below take about an hour.

1. 1Setup
   • Introduction to Observability
   • Datadog Quick Start
   • Getting Started with Notebooks
   • Tagging Best Practices
2. 2Logs
   • Getting Started with Log Explorer
   • Build and Manage Log Pipelines
   • Dive Deeper into Log Queries and Aggregations
3. 3Metrics
   • Getting Started with Metrics
   • Understanding OpenTelemetry
   • Create Custom Metrics with OpenTelemetry
   • Introduction to Dashboards
   • Getting Started with Monitors
4. 4Traces
   • Getting Started with APM Metrics & Traces
   • Introduction to OpenTelemetry with Datadog
5. 5Connect
   • Understanding Service Level Objectives
   • Getting Started with SLOs
   • Customize Alert Monitor Notifications
6. 6Incident
   • Getting Started with Incident Management
   • Diagnosing Application Bugs with Datadog APM

Learning Center courses, by session. Start with the highlighted one before the session; the others go further.

What to skip. The catalog covers far more than this course. Skip courses on installing or configuring the Datadog Agent (your team’s Agent is managed for you), on DogStatsD and the Datadog APM SDK (you instrument with OpenTelemetry), and on RUM, security and cloud integrations. Some labs also use features your team’s organization does not have, such as Bits AI and the Kubernetes explorer: follow those steps in the lab only.

If you want a ready-made sequence instead, the Core Skills learning path covers tagging, metrics, dashboards, monitors and notebooks.

Datadog documentation

The documentation has a site selector. Set it to EU so that examples and endpoints match your organization.

Unified service taggingThe service, env and version tags, and how they link your data.

Log search syntaxFree text, facets, attributes, wildcards and ranges in the Log Explorer.

Metrics ExplorerBuilding, aggregating and graphing a metric query.

NotebooksCells, time frames and sharing, for your incident write-ups.

OpenTelemetry in DatadogHow OpenTelemetry data reaches Datadog and how it is mapped.

OTLP ingestion by the AgentThe Agent receiving OTLP traces and metrics from your services.

Trace ExplorerSearching spans and traces, and grouping them.

MonitorsMonitor types, thresholds and notifications.

Service Level ObjectivesMetric-based and monitor-based SLOs, error budgets and burn rates.

Go

A Tour of GoThe interactive introduction. Start here if you have never written Go.

Go by ExampleShort annotated programs, one concept per page.

net/httpThe HTTP server and client every service in the stack uses.

Go Concurrency Patterns: ContextWhy every request carries a context.Context. Tracing depends on it.

zapThe structured logging library the services use.

OpenTelemetry

What is OpenTelemetry?The project, its components and what it does not do.

SignalsTraces, metrics and logs as OpenTelemetry defines them.

Context propagationHow a trace follows a request from one service to the next.

Go getting startedA small Go service instrumented end to end.

Go instrumentationTracers, spans, meters and instruments in the Go SDK.

otelhttpReady-made instrumentation for net/http servers and clients.

HTTP span conventionsStandard names for HTTP span attributes.

HTTP metric conventionsStandard names and units for HTTP metrics.

Kubernetes, Helm and GitLab CI

kubectl quick referenceThe kubectl commands you need, on one page.

Helm documentationCharts, templates and values, for the charts under k8s/.

GitLab CI/CDPipelines, jobs and the .gitlab-ci.yml syntax.

Further reading

Short, free chapters on the ideas behind sessions 3, 5 and 6.

Monitoring Distributed SystemsGoogle SRE book, session 3. The four golden signals.

The RED methodGrafana, session 3. Rate, errors and duration for every service.

Implementing SLOsGoogle SRE workbook, session 5. Choosing indicators and targets.

Alerting on SLOsGoogle SRE workbook, session 5. Burn-rate alerts, step by step.

Postmortem CultureGoogle SRE book, session 6. Blameless write-ups that lead to fixes.