Datadog Helps SNCF Take High-Speed Track to Digital Transformation
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- France
Product
- Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring
- Datadog Log Management
- Datadog APM products
Tech Stack
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
- Apache
- JBoss
- Tomcat
- Wildfly
- Oracle
- SQL Server
- PostgreSQL
- Python
- JavaScript
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Digital Expertise
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Railway & Metro
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
SNCF is France’s state-owned railway operator and a global provider of public transportation services. With 275,000 employees located in 120 countries, it also provides engineering and logistics expertise to assist in many public transportation projects worldwide. SNCF has long been recognized as a global leader in transportation, having introduced one of the world’s first high-speed railways, the Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV), in 1981. Since the launch of that pioneering public resource, SNCF has gone from strength to strength. The company has expanded beyond France and is now succeeding in the global arena, where it provides engineering and logistics expertise to assist in public transportation projects worldwide. SNCF is now also a thriving software company in addition to a public transportation provider, building countless internal and public-facing applications to support its operations, products, and services.
The Challenge
SNCF, France’s state-owned railway operator, embarked on a major digital transformation initiative in 2016. The goal was to update its IT infrastructure and improve its competitiveness by migrating 90% of its applications to the cloud and embracing PaaS and containerization. However, SNCF discovered that it had no coordinated approach to monitoring. Business units had been adopting monitoring solutions independently, leading to the company using a total of 11 different monitoring tools. This lack of a single, standard monitoring tool severely restricted the scope of what each team monitored, making it difficult for different IT teams to cooperate on shared problems. This was a clear impediment to the organization’s goal to improve its competitiveness and agility. Additionally, SNCF’s existing monitoring tools weren’t cloud-native, leading to user friction and extra administrative overhead.
The Solution
To promote its efforts to improve competitiveness through digital transformation, SNCF determined that it was crucial for its teams to standardize on a single, centralized monitoring solution. After a highly successful pilot program with Datadog’s Infrastructure Monitoring, Log Management, and APM products, SNCF decided to go all-in on deploying Datadog company-wide. Within eight months, SNCF migrated 4,800 servers (including 2,000 production servers), 655 applications, and 13,000 containers from older monitoring tools to Datadog. SNCF teams now use Datadog in many ways, such as for alerting, troubleshooting, reviewing application logs and performance metrics, and checking billing with cloud providers.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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