At its recent DASH 2023 conference, Datadog revealed Flex Logs and Intelligent Test Runner, two major new capabilities aimed at improving logging and testing efficiency for engineering teams.

Omri Sass, director of product management at Datadog, said Flex Logs introduces a new middle tier of log storage between real-time querying and cold archives. As Sass explained, this provides a cheaper option for retaining logs beyond the typical two weeks for occasional analytics and investigations. By decoupling storage from compute for reading logs, teams can independently scale each based on their needs. This enables retaining rich log data for months or years to uncover long-term trends, he said.

In addition, Sass noted that Flex Logs helps address common log analysis limitations around storage costs and rehydrating archives. The feature better aligns log pricing with specific use cases beyond just troubleshooting. According to Sass, this evolution in log storage tiers will likely shift more logs from legacy on-premises systems to its cloud platform.

The second capability, Intelligent Test Runner, leverages observability signals to optimize CI test suites. As Sass explained, comprehensive test automation in CI pipelines often increases deployment times and flakes. Intelligent Test Runner inspects code changes to determine associated tests, ignoring irrelevant ones, which helps avoid long wait times for minor changes just to exercise unaffected areas.

By tapping into existing telemetry around code commits, test health and runtimes, the feature adapts testing to each code modification. Sass explained that observability data has matured enough to enable real-time optimization like this. The end result is faster CI validation, so engineering teams can ship updates more rapidly.

Sass highlighted how Flex Logs and Intelligent Test Runner are Datadog’s attempts to address real pain points developers face around managing log data life cycles and CI speed bumps. Sass said he believes this combination of depth in core disciplines like logs and application performance monitoring (APM), along with expanding into adjacent developer workflows, is key to solving these issues through innovation.

Looking to the future, the observability space continues to evolve rapidly as emerging technologies and practices expand monitoring beyond traditional IT infrastructure. Companies handling modern workloads expect their observability platform to provide comprehensive visibility as development toolchains and architectures grow more complex, with the next generation of observability likely incorporating advanced analytics, automation and AI to help engineers tame systems at ever-increasing scale and speed.