Proactive Operations With Datadog

As your IT infrastructure grows, small problems can grow into large and unmanageable ones. Therefore, the ability to prevent potential problems through proactive operations is a necessity. Proactive operations involves anticipating and dealing with problems before they affect infrastructure performance, availability or security. A powerful tool that helps with proactive operations is Datadog.

Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform that provides insight into the state of your IT infrastructure. It enables your company to collect, visualise and analyse large amounts of data from different sources (such as servers, applications, databases and networks). Using this data, your company’s IT managers can take a proactive approach to operations, mitigate potential problems and optimise infrastructure performance.

Real-time monitoring

Datadog's core function is monitoring IT systems. It allows the system manager to track the health of the infrastructure in real-time. Monitoring can be seen as a two-part process; collecting information in real-time and processing it. Both can be customised to suit your needs.

Datadog offers several options for getting operating information about your IT systems. For example, stand-alone agents can easily be installed on your servers, which can continuously monitor resources like network traffic, disc space and log files. In addition, Datadog has developed solutions for a wide range of programming languages that can be used both non-invasively, where the instrumentation bypasses the software and invasively, where the instrumentation is written directly into the software code. Using these, you can extract thousands of key metrics from your IT infrastructure and the solutions you have in place.

But how do you turn the vast amounts of raw information into useful, actionable knowledge? Here, Datadog can once again help with a host of data processing pipelines, visualisation tools and AI-powered analytics.

Processing the data stream

One of the fundamental forms of processing the data flow from your IT systems is the creation of user defined monitoring devices and alarms based on specific metrics and thresholds. For example, you can monitor your CPU and memory utilisation, network latency, application response times and more.

Datadogs can be integrated with collaboration tools such as Slack or Teams, ensuring that automated notifications and alarms about critical news quickly reach the relevant team members. This allows your IT team to quickly respond to unexpected behaviour and resolve issues while they're still small or even before they occur.

In addition, Datadog has various visualisation tools that enable flexible visualisation of metrics, giving your system manager the ability to gain a visual overview of the overall health of the infrastructure.

Collection of historical data

When you collect and analyse historical data through Datadog, you can identify long-term trends, seasonal patterns or residual issues that may affect the performance of your systems. It enables your IT team to proactively address these issues and optimise the infrastructure in line with the data. For example, you can scale up resources during peak periods or fine-tune application configurations to improve performance.

By comparing real-time data with historical data, Datadog can identify abnormal behaviour or degraded performance that may indicate problems in your infrastructure. This allows you to prevent problems before they grow and impact end users.

Datadog increases collaboration and communication

Datadog provides a platform for IT teams to share dashboards, reports and insights with developers and management. It makes it easier for your employees to work together across teams, as everyone has access to the necessary information to deal with potential issues quickly and flexibly.

Our experience with Datadog

We use Datadog with almost all of our customers because it provides peace of mind that everything is running as it should. It ensures that alerts are sent out when the server experiences abnormal behaviour or resource scarcity. That way, we can correct it before it develops into an actual resource shortage, for example. Datadog can also monitor business metrics and e.g., raise an alarm if there have been fewer orders placed than were expected within a certain period of time, as this could mean the system has errors.

In addition, Datadog is easy to navigate, allowing our customers to take full control of their own IT. It provides a clear overview so that both we and our customers can respond quickly and efficiently to any issues that arise. This way, 96% of errors are corrected before they become a true error. Datadog helps ensure proactive operation and thus, a robust infrastructure.