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Nerve Centre KPIs · Audit Profile · Sentiment Settings Datadog state means nothing to a merchant unless it’s joined to revenue. This audit answers four questions: (1) is the merchant’s stack healthy right now, (2) are the monitors that should be watching it actually watching it (coverage gaps, no-notification monitors, no-data drifters), (3) are we burning the SLO error budget faster than the month, and (4) when something IS broken, how much money is on fire per minute?

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What this audit checks

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Authentication & access

  • API key + App key valid (auth on /api/v1/validate)
  • Site host correct for region (US1 / EU1 / US3 / US5 / AP1)
  • Custom-metric quota headroom > 15%
  • Indexing quota headroom > 15%

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Monitor coverage (the blind-spot test)

  • Services without error-rate monitor
  • Services without latency monitor
  • Monitors in ‘No Data’ state >24h (lost telemetry)
  • Monitors without notification channel (fires silently)
  • Monitors flapping >3 times in last 24h (noisy or wrong threshold)
  • Skipped monitors not re-enabled after >7d

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Reliability & SLO health

  • Apdex below 0.85 sustained > 30 min
  • p95 above 1500ms sustained > 15 min
  • Error rate > 2% sustained > 10 min
  • Throughput dropped > 30% WoW (capacity / outage signal)
  • SLO burn rate > 14.4× (fast-burn alert)
  • Error budget remaining < 20%
  • SLO breach forecast within 7 days

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Synthetic & uptime

  • Critical-path synthetic test failing (login / browse / cart / checkout)
  • Region-specific uptime < 99% (regional outage / CDN issue)
  • Browser test latency p95 > 5000ms
  • API monitor failures > 3 in 24h

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Real user monitoring (customer-experience signal)

  • Page load p95 > 4000ms (conversion-killer threshold)
  • Frustrated session rate > 5% (rage clicks / >4s loads)
  • JS errors per session > 0.5
  • Mobile-vs-desktop latency gap > 2× (mobile-experience regression)

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Logs & ingestion

  • Log volume up > 30% vs prior period (cost spike or runaway logging)
  • Error-level log rate > 10% of total (signal/noise drift)
  • Ingestion freshness > 300s (lag = blind to live state)
  • New error patterns emerging in last 24h
  • Indexing cost trend up > 50% MoM

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Cost & capacity

  • Custom-metric quota > 85% (impending overage charges)
  • High-cardinality tag warnings (cost-amplifier flag)
  • Infra spend trend > +15% MoM
  • Hosts with stale agent (>24h since last report)
  • Hosts with disk >90% full

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Incident response & service-health rollup

  • Mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) > 30 min (paging / on-call gap)
  • Mean time to resolve (MTTR) > 120 min (remediation drag)
  • Any service in Down or Degraded state (service-health rollup)

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Cross-channel: revenue-at-risk (the killer area)

  • Active incident with sibling commerce connector live = compute $/min lost (commerce.revenue_per_min × incident_minutes × estimated_traffic_loss_pct)
  • Checkout-service degradation (p95 > 3s) during peak hours
  • 5xx spike during a campaign push (sibling = google_ads / amazon_ads / klaviyo) - paying for traffic that can’t convert
  • Conversion drop during incident windows (vs 90D baseline)
  • Cart abandonment spike correlated with 5xx rate

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Severity thresholds

SignalWarnCritical
apdex0.90.85
error_rate_pct12
mtta_min530
mttr_min30120
services_unhealthy_count01
p95_latency_ms10001500
throughput_change_pct_wow-15-30
slo_burn_rate_1h614.4
error_budget_remaining_pct3020
synthetic_uptime_pct99.999.5
rum_page_load_p95_ms30004000
rum_frustrated_session_pct35
monitors_in_no_data_count15
monitors_no_notification_count01
custom_metric_quota_pct7585
log_volume_change_pct_vsP2030
ingestion_freshness_sec120300
agent_stale_hosts_count15
disk_pct_max8090

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Data sources

  • GET https://api.{site}/api/v1/validate - Auth + key sanity
  • GET https://api.{site}/api/v1/monitor - Monitor inventory + states + notification channels
  • POST https://api.{site}/api/v1/query - Run metric queries for threshold checks
  • POST https://api.{site}/api/v2/logs/events/search - Log volume + error-pattern detection
  • GET https://api.{site}/api/v1/synthetics/tests - Synthetic test inventory + uptime
  • GET https://api.{site}/api/v1/slo - SLO state + burn rate
  • GET https://api.{site}/api/v2/rum/applications - RUM page-load p95 + frustrated sessions
  • GET https://api.{site}/api/v2/incidents - Active incident inventory (revenue-at-risk join)
  • GET https://api.{site}/api/v1/usage/summary - Quota usage + cost-trend signals
  • GET https://api.{site}/api/v1/hosts - Host count + agent freshness + saturation