The Hidden Data Pipelines Behind Datadog: Lessons from Building Observability for Our Own Data Teams

Behind many of the Datadog products customers use every day is a data ecosystem that looks a lot like yours: Spark jobs, Airflow DAGs, dbt models, Iceberg tables, and teams depending on data arriving on time and in the right shape. In this DASH session, Jean-Mathieu Saponaro, Engineering Director at Datadog, shares how the Analytics Data Platform team partnered with the Data Observability team to unify monitoring and troubleshooting across the organization. Learn how Datadog standardized data quality and freshness checks, used lineage to understand downstream impact, and shifted from reactive pipeline management to proactively catching issues in CI. Watch for practical lessons on scaling data observability, improving reliability, and preparing trusted datasets for AI-powered applications.