Datadog

At DEPT®, we develop applications, configure infrastructures and integrate with services to guarantee the best digital user experiences. Solutions for our clients which are flexible and scalable – ready to support their business right now, and with growth. Since 1996, we live and breathe our ‘big enough to cope, small enough to care’ culture: Combining the size and scale to work with any brand in the world, with the agility, speed and personal relationships of a local, boutique agency.

When operational, you need to be in control: these solutions need to be monitored and governed. DEPT® is proud to be a Gold Tier partner of Datadog, an industry leading solution for monitoring and security. Together we maintain control over the performance, stability and scalability of your solutions.

The Gold Tier partner status is granted to DEPT® as we are a managed service provider in the Datadog Partner Network, with a certified team of engineers and sales consultants on board. Datadog’s Partner Network offers DEPT® engineers direct access to training modules and certification paths to ensure they are ready to provide best practices for our customers.

Datadog is a modern Software as a Service (SaaS) product that brings together data from infrastructures, apps, cloud integrations, and other third-party services to make your stack entirely observable. These capabilities help DevOps teams avoid downtime, resolve performance issues, and ensure customers are getting the best user experience.

This SaaS solution offers capabilities to set up monitoring rules, notification triggers, real time dashboards and many more. It integrates easily with solutions from cloud and SaaS providers, so it’s easy to set up and maintain. DEPT® leverages these capabilities to monitor complete client solutions and integrations, and based on specific business needs, by setting up dashboards and reporting mechanisms. This ensures that we know what is happening in client environments and we get notified directly when something is wrong.

DEPT® sees Datadog as an important service to enable digital transformations and cloud migrations, as it drives collaboration between development, operations, security and business teams. With Datadog, these teams all leverage the insights and reportings, which leads to better decision making and faster resolutions.

Datadog is actively used for monitoring all client related cloud environments in public clouds such as Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). With Datadog, we monitor cloud environments for clients such as Bol.com, BPD, DAS Rechtsbijstand, and TNO.

Different Datadog components are actively used to get all the information we need to be able to monitor our operational customer platforms. The Synthetics API is used to check the front-end web applications from three different locations in Europe, with an interval of 5 minutes to be able to act quickly on outages and to avoid getting false positives. The Synthetics Browser tests help us to get insights of user flows which are predefined and monitored. And, APM is used to help developers and engineers troubleshoot the performance and failures within the code of an application.

Datadog’s biggest advantage is the possibility to integrate with public clouds and the capability to additionally monitor PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) components. This leads to more insights on how cloud services are performing, and the ability to track issues and solve problems faster. Adding Log Monitoring completes the circle for being fully in control.

By combining these components, we are able to keep a complete overview of the customer platform, to identify issues, or show metrics to gain more insights of the performance.

For one of our customers we were able to increase the performance of their API because we were able to track a flaw in the application code using APM in combination with Log Monitoring. Even though this was not an issue mentioned by the customer, we were able to fix the issue proactively which eventually resulted in a higher customer satisfaction.