The author of the text is investigating why network metrics produced in Datadog are off by a factor of 2 from those seen in the AWS CloudWatch console. The discrepancy was found between the NetworkIn metric in CloudWatch and the system.net.bytes_rcvd metric in Datadog, which reports at a frequency of 15 seconds compared to CloudWatch's 5-minute intervals. To compare these values, the author applied mathematical operations to normalize them to a comparable scale, revealing that the issue lay in the different collection intervals and data points being reported by each platform. The use of tags as query dimensions helped resolve the discrepancy, allowing for more accurate comparison between the two metrics.