Ever been on‑call with angry 500s in production and zero helpful logs? In this episode of SEEK Bytes, engineers Reyna Tan, Seamus Kearney, Will Lark and Elliott Millar dive into how SEEK uses Datadog as their go‑to observability platform – from metrics and traces to dashboards and on‑call.

They unpack how Datadog helps them follow the full journey of a request across services, spot Dynamo and API issues, and use synthetic tests to run real login/apply flows in production – catching outages before customers do. Along the way they share tips on debugging with browser tools and the debugger keyword, and why learning tools like Datadog is a career‑level superpower, especially across big internal platforms and multiple squads.

In this episode, we explore:

• How Datadog ties together metrics, traces and APM so you can see end‑to‑end request lifecycles, pinpoint slow or failing dependencies, and support systems you didn’t build yourself

• Using synthetic tests and monitors to continuously exercise real user flows in production, alerting PagerDuty when upstream auth, GraphQL or downstream services break

• Why observability and debugging skills (Datadog dashboards, browser DevTools, the debugger keyword) are underrated force‑multipliers for grads and experienced engineers alike

If you’re a software engineer, SRE or tech lead who wants fewer mystery outages and faster incident response, this episode is for you.

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