This article discusses how Lithium, a social software provider, uses OpenStack as a private datacenter and monitors it with the help of Datadog. Monitoring is crucial for Lithium's infrastructure since failure can lead to significant issues such as inability to create demo environments or increased response times. Key metrics tracked by Lithium include the number of instances running, instances per project, available memory, VCPU available, and metric deltas. Datadog alerts are used to inform the right people about problems at the right time across various platforms. By using Datadog, Lithium has improved its infrastructure monitoring capabilities, allowing engineers to react quickly to issues with minimal customer impact.