Great to attend Datadog Live in Amsterdam at De Nieuwe Liefde. Strong conversations on observability, platform engineering, and what it really takes to scale modern data and cloud environments without losing visibility.
The Agenda
The event brought together practitioners and leaders from across the Dutch tech ecosystem:
- Rafik Hilal (Regional Director, Benelux, Datadog) — Welcome and Opening Remarks
- Pejman Tabassomi (EMEA CTO, Datadog) — Datadog Keynote
- Leon Bouwmeester (Director of Engineering, Head of Hue Platform, Signify) — Signify’s Journey with Datadog
- Ahold Delhaize — Their observability journey
- Alexander Tracy (Senior Enterprise Sales Engineer, Datadog) — AI for Observability
- Anu Leppanen (RVP, Enterprise Nordics and Benelux) — Closing Remarks
Followed by networking and happy hour until 20:00.
Key Themes
Real-World Migration Stories
Especially interesting to hear real-world perspectives from Signify and Ahold Delhaize on cloud migration and platform challenges. These are not startups — they are large enterprises with complex legacy systems, and their observability journeys reflect the messy reality of digital transformation.
AI for Observability
The talk on AI for observability was particularly relevant. Datadog’s LLM Observability dashboard — which I got to explore hands-on — tracks model usage, cost, latency, and performance for LLM applications. As organizations deploy more AI into production, monitoring the AI systems themselves becomes critical.
This connects directly to what we see in OpenTelemetry and broader platform engineering: observability is not just about infrastructure anymore — it extends to model performance, token costs, and inference latency.
KubeCon Afterparty Announcement
Datadog also announced their KubeCon EU Afterparty — Wednesday March 25, 17:30-22:30 at the Datadog office in Amsterdam. Already on the KubeCon side events calendar.
The Gap Between Strategy and Execution
Events like this are a good reminder that the gap between strategy and execution is getting smaller. The teams that win are the ones that can translate complexity into reliable, observable systems.
Whether you are migrating to the cloud, scaling Kubernetes clusters, or deploying AI workloads, observability is the foundation that makes everything else possible.
Thanks to Datadog for bringing the Amsterdam tech community together.
For more on observability and cloud infrastructure, connect with me on LinkedIn or follow @TheLucaBerton.
