Flatten the Datadog Bill for a Stockholm Gaming Studio
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Audit Stagelight Games' observability spend, rank top cost-drivers, and design a reduction plan to earn your verifiable certificate.
The scenario
Stagelight Games runs always-on multiplayer infrastructure where every match, region, and client build can spawn new tag values, so observability cost scales with player behavior rather than headcount. Live-service studios treat fast incident detection as revenue protection, which makes cutting metrics a politically charged exercise that has to preserve trust in the dashboards.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
Hold Datadog metric spend flat for a quarter by auditing cardinality, setting per-team budgets, and shipping a 60-day reduction plan that does not sacrifice operational visibility.
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Trace observability spend down to individual metrics and tags using a real cost inventory
- Distinguish essential signal from over-tagging and dead metrics using query recency and cardinality evidence
- Design a fair, enforceable per-team budget with overage and exception mechanics
- Sequence a reduction plan that protects agreed visibility commitments while lowering cost
- Communicate a cost-control case to engineering leadership in a way that earns enforcement
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Aligned coursework coming soon.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
- Cardinality Control
Apply cardinality control to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Datadog
Apply datadog to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Cost Optimization
Apply cost optimization to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Observability
Apply observability to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Metric Design
Apply metric design to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Stakeholder Communication
Apply stakeholder communication to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
Platform / Observability Engineer
Owning observability cost and signal quality is a core platform-team responsibility. This challenge mirrors the real work of auditing cardinality, governing metric growth, and keeping monitoring useful while spend stays predictable, which is exactly what observability engineers are hired to do.
This challenge sharpens
- cardinality-control
- datadog
- observability
FinOps / Cloud Cost Engineer
FinOps roles turn cloud and tooling spend into governed budgets with accountable owners. Designing per-team allocations and a reduction plan tied to traceable cost data builds the exact muscle these teams use to flatten bills without blocking engineering.
This challenge sharpens
- cost-optimization
- cardinality-control
- stakeholder-communication
Site Reliability Engineer
Reliability engineers constantly trade off monitoring coverage against cost and noise. Learning to cut metrics while protecting incident-detection visibility, and to design metric-review guardrails, prepares you for the reliability side of platform work.
This challenge sharpens
- observability
- metric-design
- datadog