datadog Cheering on coworkers: Building culture with Datadog dashboards | Datadog (opens in new tab)
Datadog engineers developed a real-time tracking dashboard to monitor a colleague’s progress during an 850km, six-day ultra-marathon challenge. By scraping public race statistics and piping the data into their monitoring platform, the team created a centralized visualization tool to provide remote support and office-wide engagement. ### Data Extraction and Parsing The team needed to harvest race data that was only available as plain HTML on the event’s official website. * A crawler was built using the Python `Requests` library to automate the retrieval of the webpage's source code. * The team utilized `BeautifulSoup` to parse the HTML and isolate specific data points, such as the runner's current ranking and total distance covered. ### Ingesting Metrics with StatsD Once the data was structured, it was converted into telemetry using the Datadog agent and the `statsd` Python library. * The script utilized `dog.gauge` to emit three primary metrics: `runner.distance`, `runner.ranking`, and `runner.elapsed_time`. * Each metric was assigned a "name" tag corresponding to the runner, allowing the team to filter data and compare participants within the Datadog interface. * The data was updated periodically to ensure the dashboard reflected the most current race standings. ### Dashboard Visualization and Results The final phase involved synthesizing the metrics into a high-visibility dashboard displayed in the company’s New York and Paris offices. * The dashboard combined technical performance graphs with multimedia elements, including live video feeds and GIFs, to create an interactive cheering station. * The system successfully tracked the athlete's 47km lead in real-time, providing the team with immediate updates on his physical progress and elapsed time over the 144-hour event. This project demonstrates how standard observability tools can be repurposed for creative "life-graphing" applications. By combining simple web scraping with metric ingestion, engineers can quickly build custom monitoring solutions for any public data source.