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Voice typing in Datadog

Dashboards show what happened; the notes beside them explain what it meant. Hold a key and talk: Typally transcribes and types it into Datadog without you touching the keyboard.

Disclosure: Typally is our product. We have tried to describe what Datadog already does without talking you out of using it.
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In short

  • Datadog's own dictation: None. Notebook text, monitor descriptions and incident notes are typed.
  • What Typally does instead: covers Datadog and every other program on the machine with one hotkey.
  • Best used for: monitor descriptions and runbooks

Does Datadog have built-in dictation?

None. Notebook text, monitor descriptions and incident notes are typed.

Why dictate in Datadog at all?

A monitor firing at three in the morning wakes someone who has to work out, from the alert alone, whether it matters. If the monitor has no description explaining what it detects and what to do, that person is starting from nothing.

In practice people use it for: Monitor descriptions and runbooks, notebook narratives, incident timelines, and dashboard annotations.

How to dictate in Datadog

You do not configure anything in Datadog. The hotkey works wherever your cursor happens to be:

1

Start with the install

Windows or macOS build, signed in once.

2

Put the cursor in the Datadog field you are filling

Text goes wherever Datadog has focus. One click first saves undoing a paragraph in the wrong box.

3

Hold the hotkey and talk

Say the whole thought, then let go. No time limit.

4

Read it before you move on

Datadog notebooks mix markdown and query cells. Dictate into the text cells only.

What Typally adds in Datadog

Typally types into monitor descriptions, notebook text cells and incident notes, so the runbook line that saves the on-call engineer twenty minutes gets written in about thirty seconds. Writing incident notes live rather than reconstructing them afterwards is the single biggest improvement to a postmortem, and speaking is what makes live notes possible.

What this looks like in practice

An on-call engineer writes descriptions for the twenty noisiest monitors, speaking each one. The next person on rotation resolves two alerts without escalating, because the description told them what to check.

One habit that makes it work better

Every monitor needs a description saying what it means and what to do first. Writing it takes thirty spoken seconds and saves the on-call engineer twenty minutes at the worst possible hour.

What to watch out for in Datadog

Datadog notebooks mix markdown and query cells. Dictate into the text cells only.

Frequently asked questions

Does Datadog have voice input?

No. All text entry is typed.

What belongs in a monitor description?

What condition triggered it, why that matters, and the first thing to check. That is the difference between an alert and a useful alert.

Can I dictate incident timelines?

Yes, and doing it live during an incident produces a far better postmortem than reconstructing afterwards.

Try it in Datadog

There is a permanent free tier of 100 minutes a month. Pro costs $7.99/month and raises the limit.

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Also dictate in: Grafana · PagerDuty · Sentry · CLion · nano · see all apps