How Attentive connects load testing and observability with Datadog and Gatling

Attentive operates a high-scale messaging platform where backend services must handle sustained traffic under strict reliability requirements. As the platform grew, the team needed more than isolated load tests.

They needed a way to understand how traffic actually flowed through gateways, services, and infrastructure under pressure.

_‍In this live session, Bian Jiang, Principal Engineer on Attentive’s Developer Experience team, will walk through how Attentive connects load testing with observability by combining Gatling and Datadog.

He’ll share how the team validates performance at scale, uncovers hidden bottlenecks, and builds confidence in system readiness through correlated testing and monitoring.

Speaker: Bian Jiang, Principal Engineer, Developer Experience, Attentive

Moderators: Diego Salinas, Content Marketing Manager; Heather Thacker, Developer Relations, Gatling

Ideal for: Platform engineers, DevOps teams, SREs, performance engineers, and engineering leaders responsible for operating systems at scale

What you’ll learn

• How Attentive reasons about performance readiness at high scale
• How to correlate generated load with real system behavior using Datadog
• How load testing exposed gateway and infrastructure bottlenecks
• What changes when testing systems under sustained load
• Why Private Locations matter when testing internal, non-public environments
• Lessons learned moving from Gatling Community Edition to Enterprise Edition