Last week RapDev hit the road (and sky) once again to attend the observability event of the year: Datadog’s DASH conference in NYC. As always, the week was packed with loads of great conversations and awesome new releases from the Datadog Product teams. The RapDev team spared no expense at bringing a showout display of our own, as we ran our largest booth to date on the expo hall floor, threw the largest happy hour in DASH history, and took home some Datadog Partner of the Year for the fourth year in a row. 

Datadog Partner of the Year 2025

This year’s DASH schedule looked slightly different, with partner-specific events taking place prior to the actual opening of the conference. To kick off, the Datadog Partner Summit was held Monday afternoon. Here, attending partners gathered to celebrate the last year and hear more about what’s coming in the future for the Datadog Partner Network. Ryan Henrich, RapDev’s Director of Security, took the stage to showcase RapDev’s DevSecOps strategy. And finally, RapDev took home our first win of the week here as we won our 4th consecutive Partner of the Year award, reinforcing our dedication to our customers as we help them embark on their Datadog journeys.

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We came, we coded, we conquered

Following the Partner Summit was one of my personal favorite events: the Datadog Partner Network Technical Challenge - Tears of an SRE. For this challenge, participants create teams acting as SREs for an e-commerce organization that is undergoing an attack during a Black Friday sales event. The challenge is in a Capture-the-Flag format, where teams must solve a series of tasks within the e-commerce’s Datadog environment to earn points. The team to end with the highest number of points at the end of the challenge is the winner. RapDev had members on 2 teams since we brought 6 engineers and the max per team was 5. We put our Datadog knowledge and skills on full display during the challenge as our teams finished in first and second place. This was a great way to get our blood pumping and minds racing before the busy couple of days we had ahead of us.

I heard you like AI…

It was to no surprise that AI took the center of the stage during this year’s keynote, with Datadog announcing a myriad of AI-related product releases for the platform from Bits AI agents that aid in troubleshooting, to their new MCP server for interacting with the Datadog platform with your own AI agents, and more. To follow suit, RapDev showcased Arlo, our newly developed AI troubleshooting agent that can be used for information gathering and taking action on VMs, Kubernetes clusters, and network devices from within the operating system - a perfect companion for Bits to help customers get to the bottom of incidents faster. 

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In addition to all these cool new AI features, I couldn’t help but admire a lot of the other releases announced by Datadog as well. A few of my favorites were:

• The new Datadog Internal Developer Portal - from self-service actions to loads of new Software Catalog updates, this new-and-improved feature of Datadog can really help accelerate software delivery and best practice reinforcement.
• Log Archive Search - being able to do direct queries of archived logs from Datadog without having to rehydrate them back to the platform is huge, especially for compliance teams.
• Data Observability - with data ruling the world around us, being able to monitor and visualize the lifecycle of data from ingestion to downstream usage is crucial to a lot of organizations.

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In addition to the main keynote, day 2 of DASH had a slightly different twist to it, as Datadog welcomed their first ever celebrity guest speaker - Kumail Nanjiani. You may know him from the popular TV show “Silicon Valley” or the film “The Big Sick.” During his time on stage he talked about when/why/how he decided to quit pursuing a computer science degree, his early days doing standup comedy in Chicago, and what keeps him motivated to keep growing in his career as an actor and comedian. As a Datadog ambassador, I even got to meet him in person afterwards, which was honestly pretty cool for me.

Networking & puppies at rooftop happy hour

If you attended the happy hour we co-hosted with Datadog last year, you know RapDev throws a mean party. We had such a great time last year that we decided to bring the party back to Versa rooftop bar, but we went even bigger. This year as the official happy hour of DASH 2025 we reserved the entire restaurant space, had even more attendees (550+), and of course it wouldn’t be a RapDev happy hour without fireball and puppies. After popular demand DJ Tameem took the stand for a short while to show he’s still got it.

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As per tradition, both Datadog and RapDev put on quite the standout performance at DASH. It was amazing to be able to meet so many new people, see some familiar customer faces (some for the first time in person), chat observability, and form/reinforce some strong partnerships with both Datadog employees and other conference attendees. Not sure how Datadog plans to top this year’s event next year, but they somehow still manage to do it. I can’t wait to see what they have in store for us next year as we return to NYC for DASH 2026.

Anything we chatted about you're curious to follow up on? Reach out to us.