As your applications scale, keeping a close eye on them becomes more important than ever–it also becomes harder the more data you have. That’s why we’re pleased to announce that we have made several new observability, monitoring, and hardening advancements to DigitalOcean Managed Databases–to give you better visibility, understanding, and peace of mind.

What’s new?

To be exact, we have made three advancements that will improve your Managed Database observability experience here at DigitalOcean. Let’s walk through all three of them.

Datadog Integration

DigitalOcean Managed Databases now supports log forwarding to Datadog, enabling seamless integration to your existing Datadog observability dashboard. You can now send, view, and analyze your Managed Database logs directly within Datadog. This feature will enhance your overall observability and monitoring. Key features of this integration include:

• Direct log forwarding: This feature automatically pushes your database service logs to Datadog’s log intake endpoints, eliminating the need to manage a separate log collection agent. By automating log forwarding, you no longer have to worry about deploying, managing, or scaling additional logging agents, which helps to reduce operational complexity.

• UI-based configuration: The integration is fully configurable through the management console, allowing you to set it up for most database types directly within the log forwarding section. UI-based configuration simplifies the setup process and consolidates your database logs with application and infrastructure telemetry, improving visibility and monitoring—all without the need for managing separate agents.

• Customizable log templates: The Datadog log template can be customized per database, enabling specific log details or filtering to suit your needs. Tailoring log outputs for each database allows you to reduce unnecessary data, minimize Datadog ingestion and indexing costs, and focus on the log data most relevant to your business.

Ultimately, by offering integration with Datadog, one of the most popular observability platforms, you gain control over your observability stack. This integration will allow you to easily and quickly forward customized database logs directly to your Datadog dashboard, which in an increasingly multicloud world, is very valuable.

Default resource alerts and advanced cluster event notifications

The second advancements are default resource alerts and advanced cluster event notifications. While similar, they are distinct from one another.

Default resource alerts are pre-configured notifications that automatically warn you when your database approaches critical resource thresholds–such as CPU, memory, or disk space. These alerts act as an early warning system, helping you catch performance degradation or potential downtime before it happens. Because they’re enabled by default when new databases are created, there’s no setup required–giving you seamless, always-on monitoring that keeps your team informed.

Advanced cluster event notifications, on the other hand, are triggered by significant lifecycle events within your cluster–such as high resource utilization, failovers, node restarts, or maintenance actions. These event-based alerts provide real-time operational insight, allowing your team to respond quickly to changes, perform root cause analysis, and maintain uptime without digging through logs. Like default resource alerts, they’re fully automated and designed to keep you in the loop without any extra effort.

Together, these features give you deeper observability into your cluster’s behavior and health, helping you stay proactive, stable, and ready to respond.

Trusted sources IP Labeling

The third advancement we have made is trusted IP sources labeling. This feature allows you to assign descriptive labels to the IP addresses in your whitelist, making it easier to identify, manage, and audit connection origins for your Managed Databases. By enabling you to tag IP entries with meaningful labels, this feature improves the usability and manageability of your database’s allowlist, especially when working with large or dynamically changing sets of IPs.

Trusted source IP labeling also contributed to stronger database hardening, which is the practice of securing a database by implementing security best practices to minimize vulnerability. By decreasing the likelihood of operation errors, such as accidentally modifying or deleting the wrong IP address, this feature helps reduce the risk of misconfigurations that could expose your database to threats. Overall, it enhances your overall security posture by providing better visibility into which systems or teams are authorized to connect your database services.

Resources to get started

Ready to get started? Use the links below to start using Managed Databases.

• Spin up a Managed Database cluster to try it out for yourself

• View our product documentation

• Learn more about the our Managed Database engines

• Contact our sales team or connect with a DigitalOcean partner who can help advise you on architecture reviews, deployments, and other infrastructure assistance

• Interested in migrating to DigitalOcean? Learn more here