Driving Ardent Innovation Series: Datadog

In the latest of our ‘Driving Ardent Innovation Series’, a team led by Nikhil Singh and Rohan Chavan took a dive into DataDogs, a leading and widely used monitoring technology which is often an essential part of the DevOps tech stack. At Ardent we are committed to ongoing R&D so we encourage and support our team to explore new technologies to find the most suitable ones for our client project.

What is Datadog?

Datadog is a Saas-based data analytics platform that is primarily used for the observability and monitoring of cloud infrastructure, Windows and Linux hosts, system processes, serverless functions, and cloud-based applications. It’s a useful technology to gain in-depth insights into IT infrastructure. Datadog has a share of 1.69% for Network Monitoring and has the biggest user base in the USA according to 6sense. Datadog's top competitors include GStatic, Azure CDN and Nagios.

Key Datadog features?

Some of the key features that make Datadog a serious contender when it comes to network, cloud, infrastructure or application monitoring include:

• Real-time analytics – You can monitor services in real-time, which can be great for mission-critical applications and data.
• Wide range of integrations – There are over 600 integrations available with DataDog which makes it incredibly versatile and makes it stand out from competitors.
• Multiple types of integrations – These include agent-based, authentication (crawler) based and libraries.
• Ease of use – Datadog has an easy-to-use UI (User Interface) and integration can be made quickly, easily and seamlessly.
• Customizable dashboard – You can customise dashboards to your preference, needs and requirements.
• Alerting integrations – You can integrate with the likes of Slack and PagerDuty to set up alerts.
• Custom queries – Datadog provides you with the ability to create custom queries to leverage the technology for your specific requirements.
• Cost-effective – It is considered cost-effective, as opposed to others in the market. Plans start from around $15 a month.

Why our team chose Datadog

Datadog offers several great features listed above, however, of the main reasons the R&D team chose Datadog to explore was the wide range of implementations it offers. For our client's project, we work with a wide range of technologies ranging from a multitude of technologies offered by AWS (Amazon API Gateway, Amazon EC2, S3 buckets) offered by Azure (Azure App Service) and others such as Flutter, Kafka and Salesforce. Additionally, the data can be stored on-premise, in local systems and cloud environments and we can monitor all these systems with Datadog.

“Datadog stands out from its competitors in many ways, particularly for us, it can integrate with over 600 integrations. Additionally, it is easy to set up integrations and get started with real-time monitoring”.

Nikhil Singh.

Datadog use case

There are many use cases for Datadog and they include:

• Cloud infrastructure monitoring – Our team carried out a POC of integrating Datadog with Amazon EC2 machines to observe and monitor the data with a number of metrics including CPU disk utilisation, performance, failures based on pre-defined thresholds, traffic loads and data latency.
• Application performance monitoring – Datadog can be used to monitor the performance of applications, especially those that may be high traffic and may need continuous speed and uptime.
• Data pipelines – Data Pipelines is just one of the many data infrastructure that can be monitored in real-time with Datadog. This can help you spot data gaps, data delays and any latency issues.

Overall Datadog is a versatile tool, and our DevOps team will further explore the technology to decide what client projects may be most suitable for you.

Ardent commitment to innovation

At Ardent, we are invested in continuous innovation and support our team in their journeys of learning and exploring new technologies. We will continue to find the best technologies in the market to fit the needs and requirements of our clients for their data engineering, software development, DevOps and SRE services.

Learn more about the Ardent way, read the Driving Ardent Innovation: Prometheus & Grafana or explore our operational monitoring and support services.

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