This document discusses effective application monitoring using tools like Datadog. It introduces the OODA loop concept of observe, orient, decide, and act for monitoring systems. Key aspects that observations from monitoring tools need to be timely, correct, and comprehensive. It then discusses how StatsD works as a simple and effective monitoring tool that collects custom metrics and sends them to backends using a simple text protocol. The document cautions about some common pitfalls of StatsD like treating counters as rates instead of counts and issues with histograms assuming normal distributions. It emphasizes the importance of tagging for organizing metrics and provides links to get started with StatsD.