This is an old revision of the document!
Table of Contents
Datadog is a SaaS-based observability platform that provides monitoring and analytics for applications and infrastructure.
Datadog Skills Matrix
This table organizes Datadog topics by priority level—core, common, and specialized—to reflect their relative importance and expected familiarity across teams. It provides a shared reference for understanding which Datadog areas are foundational versus more advanced or niche.
| Datadog Topic | Priority |
| Tagging | 1 - Core |
| Logs | 1 - Core |
| Monitors and Alerting | 1 - Core |
| Dashboards | 1 - Core |
| Integrations - Common (e.g. AWS, nginx, postgres) | 1 - Core |
| Infrastructure (Windows) | 1 - Core |
| Infrastructure (Linux) | 1 - Core |
| Synthetics | 2 - Common |
| Serverless | 2 - Common |
| APM - Basic Setup | 2 - Common |
| DBM (Databases) | 2 - Common |
| NDM (Network Devices) | 2 - Common |
| Docker / Kubernetes | 2 - Common |
| Ansible | 2 - Common |
| SLAs / SLOs | 2 - Common |
| SIEM (Security) | 3 - Specialized |
| RUM | 3 - Specialized |
| Cost Optimization | 3 - Specialized |
| APM - Java | 3 - Specialized |
| APM - Python | 3 - Specialized |
| APM - Javascript | 3 - Specialized |
| APM - C# | 3 - Specialized |
| APM - Serverless | 3 - Specialized |
| DBM - Postgres | 3 - Specialized |
| LLM Monitoring | 3 - Specialized |
| Data Jobs (e.g. Databricks, Apache Spark, EMR) | 3 - Specialized |
| DBM - SQL Server | 3 - Specialized |
| Datadog Oncall | 3 - Specialized |
Datadog Fundamentals Certification
- Exam Guide PDF (from the Datadog Certifications Page)
What to Study
Also see DD Fundamentals Certification Study Guide.
Courses (the sre and dev courses have been replaced, even though they're still mentioned in the exam guide):
Documentation to Review:
- Getting Started
- Datadog Agent
- Metrics
- Infrastructure List
- API and Application Keys
- Integrations
- Docker Daemon
- Query to the graph
- Docker Agent
- Metrics API
- Monitor types
- DogStatsD
- ddtrace
- Canonical Hostnames
Register for Exam
Topics Related to Using Datadog
Tech-learning platforms such as www.coursera.org and www.udacity.com are good for learning about topics related to Datadog.
These topics in particular are useful for understanding different scenarios in which Datadog is used: