If you know me you know that if I can't monitor something in Datadog it may as well not exist, so as I'm starting to roll out some Akka.NET systems naturally I needed to get some observability in there. There is already some basic StatsD support that ships in the core Akka.Monitoring packages, but that fell a little short of what I wanted. Namely, if your actor system is named mysystem and your actor…

There are a number of useful performance counters exposed for System.Data.SqlClient that can provide some nice insight into what's going on under the hood of your applications. Today I found myself monitoring the NumberOfReclaimedConnections counter to track down some connections that weren't being properly disposed. It's certainly not ideal to need to log into the servers to monitor this, so I went off looking for how to expose this through our Datadog dashboards. On…

I recently broke down and purchased an Amazon Echo after hearing enough good things about it, and also seeing how straightforward it looked to develop for it. It's no secret that I'm a big fan of Datadog, so naturally I felt like I needed to mix the two. I've previously covered exposing Datadog metrics through Hubot, so I figured I'd try to do something similar for the Echo. I decided to create and host the skill…

In case you haven't noticed, I've been rambling a lot lately on the topic of app monitoring and instrumentation, including a visit to Jesse Liberty's podcast as well as my session at Xamarin Evolve. For whatever reason I've been allowed to keep rambling about it since then, so I have some more links to share! dotnetConf I was invited to speak at dotnetConf, which was an awesome virtual conference involving many great folks from Microsoft in…

Last week I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at my third Xamarin Evolve, and as always it was a great time. Video from my session is now available to watch: The slides are also available here, though you lose out on the critical animations: All of the code, including everything from the sample app to the Hubot instance, is available on GitHub.…