Datadog On Air: Datadog On Air Live From San Francisco Summit 2026

This is the lightboard from my Datadog Illuminated episode with Julien Le Dem on OpenLineage.

Before OpenLineage, if your data broke somewhere in the pipeline, you had no way to trace it back to where it went wrong. OpenLineage fixes that by giving every tool a shared language for where data came from, so you can find the exact source of the problem instead of guessing.

Read the full board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A chalkboard-style lightboard diagram titled "OpenLineage - A common observability framework for data pipelines." The left side lists problems: isolated teams, bad data propagates (errors, privacy), finding bad data sources is hard, no common language. The center shows a diagram of Org A, Org B, and Org C connected by data flow arrows feeding into a "Data Lineage Repo," along with definitions for Job, Run, and Datasets (input/output), and a note that facets are metadata specs specific to a technology. Below that, a box lists what OpenLineage unlocks: trying different tools easily, easier onboarding, root cause identification, data reliability, and impact analysis and compliance. The right side shows OpenLineage as a hub connecting lineage producers (Airflow, Spark, Snowflake) to lineage consumers (Marquez, DataHub, Datadog), with a circled note reading "OpenLineage at Datadog" listing data job monitoring, data quality monitoring, and lineage graph use cases.

“Managing Kubernetes RBAC manually is a path to burnout.”

In this episode of 🌩️Thunder, Saim Safdar, CNCF Ambassador and host of the Cloud Native Podcast, explains how Paralus centralizes Kubernetes access management across your clusters.

Paralus replaces per-cluster role juggling with a single layer for SSO, group-based access control, and full kubectl audit logs, whether you have one cluster or dozens across cloud providers and on-prem.

Give it a watch! youtu.be/9meKq_7Ww…

Two people flank a lightboard. On the left, Saim Safdar, a man with short dark hair wearing a white collared shirt, looks toward the camera with a calm expression. On the right, Whitney, a woman with long brown hair wearing a patterned top, laughs and points at the board. The board displays "WHAT IS Paralus? KUBERNETES ACCESS CONTROL MADE SIMPLE" in large yellow letters with handwritten lightboard notes visible behind. The Thunder show logo appears in the top left corner. Text at the bottom left reads "With SAIM SAFDAR." The background is white with decorative colorful shapes.

Software Defined Interviews: The KubeCon Drone Demo, CFP Reviewing at Scale, and the Agentic AI Foundation, with Lin Sun

InfoQ: AI Meets Internal Developer Platform (InfoQ coverage of KubeCon EU talk with Viktor Farcic)

Datadog On Air: Datadog On Air Live From San Francisco Summit 2026

Datadog Illuminated: Evaluating an AI-Powered Process That Creates and Tunes Monitors, with Eric Karschner

LLMday Austin: The Best Laid Spans: An AI Agent That Instruments Your Code with OpenTelemetry

We secure data at rest. We secure data in transit. But what about data in use?

In this episode of 🌩️Thunder, Tobin Feldman-Fitzthum explains how Confidential Containers uses hardware-level trusted execution environments to isolate your Kubernetes workloads from everything outside them, including the Kubernetes control plane and the cloud provider itself.

Have a look-see! youtu.be/WdW-_KU_B…

Whitney Lee on the left, laughing, wearing a dark jacket with bangs. Tobin Feldman-Fitzthum on the right, shown in a black-and-white photo. Large yellow text reads Confidential Containers and white text below reads Hardware Protection for Kubernetes Workloads, with the name Tobin Feldman-Fitzthum at the bottom in yellow. A lightboard covered in handwritten technical notes fills the background. The 🌩️Thunder show logo appears in the top-left corner.

Software Defined Interviews: The KubeCon Drone Demo, CFP Reviewing at Scale, and the Agentic AI Foundation, with Lin Sun

Datadog Illuminated: Evaluating an Agent That Creates and Tunes Monitors, with Eric Karschner

kagent is a framework to help you make AI agents and run them in Kubernetes declaratively, with YAML.

Lin Sun, co-creator of kagent, joined to walk through how it works. Here’s the lightboard we made together.

Read the notes: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

A hand-drawn lightboard diagram on a black background, filled with colorful marker text and boxes mapping out how kagent works. Sections include "Before kagent," "kagent config" with a Kubernetes CRD circle, "kagent controller watches," "Agent Sandbox," "Agent Runtimes," "Why run your agent on Kubernetes," "AUTH," and "How do people use kagent," connected by arrows and underlines in pink, yellow, and green.

InfoQ: AI Meets Internal Developer Platform (InfoQ coverage of KubeCon EU talk with Viktor Farcic)

Datadog Illuminated: Evaluating an AI-Powered Process That Creates and Tunes Monitors, with Eric Karschner

Will AI help or hinder a developer’s experience with an internal platform? At KubeCon EU, the audience found out. My bestie Viktor Farcic (Upbound) and I ran an interactive session where attendees voted at key moments on which tools our AI agent would use. I built the demo to work with any combination they chose, on the fly.

The agent investigated a broken app, used semantic search to navigate cluster resources, and deployed on a developer’s behalf, with no cluster access required. Expect surprises, stumbles, and a real conversation about what AI is (and isn’t) ready for in platform engineering.

Watch the recording here: youtu.be/k7ct4sW-9…

Title slide on an orange background. Large bold white text reads "Choose Your Own Adventure: AI Meets Internal Developer Platform." Below in white italic: "Whitney Lee, Datadog & Viktor Farcic, Upbound." The KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 logos appear in the upper left corner. A stylized windmill and Dutch tulips decorate the right side and bottom corners.

Software Defined Interviews: DevOpsDays, Technical Storytelling, and Loading the Dishwasher, with Jason Yee

Datadog Illuminated: Building an Eval Platform for an Investigation Agent, with Benjamin Barton

In this Datadog Illuminated episode, Scott Yak & I discuss how evals for the Datadog MCP server run against live data that goes stale FAST

How did Scott & team solve this?

See the lightboard below & read the board notes here: gist.github.com/wiggitywh…

Handwritten green, yellow, and white notes on a black lightboard titled "Evaluating the Datadog MCP Server." Left column shows "Why eval MCP server?" with a diagram of a query flowing from a person through an Agent (LLM), Datadog MCP, and Datadog Backend and back. Below it, "How eval MCP server?" defines eval = Agent harness + MCP server + Q&A pair, with Actual ≈ expected response (if passing). Middle column shows "Automate eval generation," a flow starting with a seed query fanning out into "FUZZING" to make many question variants, with a note that one seed produces many Q/A pairs and evals get re-run to update answers. Right side lists "Benefits of Great Evals" in four numbered sections: Speed (fast to generate, fast to run, see impact quickly), Visibility Into Progress (high quantity of evals, tagging, traces), Mutual Benefit (Datadog AI agents like Bits AI SRE and Bits AI Assistant use the Datadog MCP, so a better MCP server means better agents), and Devs Like Writing Evals (fast feedback, showing impact, preventing regression).

AI Engineer World’s Fair: Build a Platform, Unleash an Agent on it…. and Watch it Burn!

At Cloud Native AI Day (KubeCon EU), Thomas Vitale (Systematic) and I co-presented a live demo where audience votes drove real-time canary rollouts for GenAI apps using OpenTelemetry and Flagger.

Watch the recording here: youtu.be/CRcYbl-g3…

Title slide with a light blue gradient background. Large dark blue bold text reads: Rollout on Reception: Progressive Delivery for GenAI Apps Using Real-Time User Feedback. Below in dark blue italic: Thomas Vitale, Systemic and Whitney Lee, Data Dog. In the upper right corner: the Cloud Native AI + Kubeflow Day Europe logo, a hexagonal badge with a brain icon and EUROPE in a blue box.