How to Play
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1
Confirm your workshop context
Use the Datadog organization, team, and environment specified by the facilitators for this workshop.
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2
Open a challenge
Start from Challenges. Each prompt describes a customer symptom, operational question, or investigation target.
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3
Investigate in Datadog
Use the products and pivots implied by the prompt, such as APM, Logs, RUM, DBM, LLM Observability, Feature Flags, or Security views.
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4
Use pawfolio when it helps
The app is available as the investigation target, but most answers should be supported by Datadog telemetry rather than by guessing from the UI.
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5
Submit the exact answer
Submit the exact value requested by the prompt, such as a service name, attribute, status code, variant, or Datadog value.
Rules of Engagement
- Use only the Datadog access, CTFd team, and workshop environment assigned to your team.
- Do not brute-force answers, tokens, or application endpoints.
- Do not change shared Datadog configuration, feature flags, Synthetics tests, dashboards, monitors, or CTFd settings unless a facilitator asks you to.
- Do not delete data, reset shared resources, or disrupt another team's investigation.
- Discuss investigation techniques freely, but keep final answers private while the game is active.
Solving Approach
- Treat the CTFd prompt as the source of truth for scope, answer format, and rounding rules.
- Keep your Datadog time window, service filter, environment, and team context aligned with the prompt.
- Use pivots such as trace IDs, session IDs, user identifiers, status codes, routes, feature flag keys, and error messages.
- When two signals disagree, prefer the source that directly observes the value being asked for.