Sweetwater's proactive data observability playbook with Datadog

How do you convince an entire organization to trust your process for consolidating disjointed, siloed data? The harder question is: what happens when trust starts to erode because of the consequences of that same disjointed data? On the surface, everything seems functional, but our analytics team at Sweetwater was dealing with issues like stale data in reports and no way to know until it escalated.

We'll share how we paired dbt with Datadog to build proactive observability into our pipeline and catch problems before stakeholders do. You'll hear how we caught a long-running script delaying order updates before anyone noticed, and how adopting dbt Mesh gave departments enough ownership to ease the cultural transition. You'll leave with an honest look at the organizational and technical tradeoffs that come with centralization, and a practical model for building trust through observability.