Improving Application Performance and DevOps Collaboration with a Unified Monitoring Platform
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- Datadog
- Terraform Enterprise
- Vagrant
- Consul
Tech Stack
- Ruby on Rails
- Amazon ECS
- Amazon RDS
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
- Customer Satisfaction
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
- Computer Vision
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
HashiCorp, the company behind open source software projects such as Vagrant, Terraform, and Consul, helps organizations manage their infrastructure through code-based automation. Terraform Enterprise is one of HashiCorp’s first major commercial products. As it expands and attracts more high-profile customers, HashiCorp relies on Datadog to help support its growing team and platform. As HashiCorp prepared for Terraform Enterprise’s public release in 2017, they began to focus on growing the team that develops and supports the product’s platform. But as the organization evolved from a core group of generalist engineers to one with more specialized teams, HashiCorp found it difficult to share tribal knowledge about their system and its interdependencies with new team members.
The Challenge
HashiCorp’s self-hosted monitoring tools had poor usability, which led to a lack of visibility into their systems. This left engineers without quick feedback on new product features and ill-equipped to effectively troubleshoot issues. The limited access to real-time monitoring and alerting hindered the team’s responses to issues, causing unnecessary delays in incident diagnosis and resolution. The lack of visibility was attributed to the poor usability of the self-hosted monitoring tools that HashiCorp was using at the time, which left engineers ill-equipped to effectively troubleshoot issues or get real-time feedback on new product features. The limited access to real-time monitoring and alerting hindered the team’s responses to issues, causing unnecessary delays in problem diagnosis and resolution. Without the ability to track and compare current and historical states, troubleshooting became a reactive, time-consuming, and tedious task.
The Solution
Datadog provided HashiCorp with the visibility they needed to maintain application and system health, and offered a user-friendly platform that made these insights accessible across their organization. For Matt McQuillan, a HashiCorp SRE, the change was palpable: “It’s the difference of going to this weird IP address with an older interface and figuring it out for yourself, versus Datadog, which is more intuitive to use and easier to get to.” Now, instead of operational visibility being limited to one or two monitoring experts, dozens of team members have ready access to the data they need to rapidly troubleshoot performance problems or test new features. With 450+ built-in integrations, connections to HashiCorp’s Terraform and Nomad products, and the ability to pull performance data directly from their application, Datadog provides HashiCorp with an easy-to-understand, cohesive view of their internal and customer-facing systems.
Operational Impact
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Infosys achieves a 5–7 percent effort reduction across projects
Infosys, a global leader in consulting, technology, and outsourcing solutions, was facing significant challenges in application development and maintenance due to its distributed teams, changing business priorities and the need to stay in alignment with customer needs. The company used a mix of open source, home-grown and third-party applications to support application development projects. However, challenges resulting from distributed teams using manual processes increased as the company grew. It became more and more important for Infosys to execute its projects efficiently, so they could improve quality, reduce defects and minimize delays.
Case Study
Arctic Wolf Envelops Teamworks with 24x7 Cybersecurity Protection and Comprehensive Visibility
Teamworks, a leading athlete engagement platform, faced rising cyberthreats and needed enhanced visibility into its network, servers, and laptops. With software developers connecting from all over the world, the company sought to improve its security posture and position itself for future growth. The company had a secure platform but recognized the need for a more proactive solution to identify gaps within its technology infrastructure. Data exfiltration and malicious access were top concerns, prompting the need for a comprehensive security upgrade.
Case Study
Sawback IT and Datto Save Client From a Costly Mistake
Ballistic Echo, a software development house, faced a critical challenge when human error led to the deletion of thousands of lines of unique code. This incident occurred before the code was pushed to source control, resulting in significant loss of time, revenue, and work. The previous file-level backup solution they used was slow and inefficient, making it nearly impossible to manually recreate the lost work. The need for a more reliable and efficient business continuity solution became evident to avoid such disasters in the future.
Case Study
Opal Helps Customers Shine Thanks to Datto
SP Flooring & Design Center faced a ransomware attack that encrypted and locked their files. The attack was initiated through a compromised service account set up by an outside vendor. The ransomware infection was isolated quickly, but there was a concern about the extent of the data at risk. The company had backups in place but was unsure of how much information was compromised. The situation required immediate action to prevent further damage and restore the affected data.
Case Study
Zapier Aggregates Multiple Analytics in a Single Dashboard with the New Relic Platform
Zapier, a company that enables non-technical users to push data between hundreds of web applications, was facing a challenge in automating and provisioning servers for optimal performance. The company's environment consisted of 50 Linux servers on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a Django application split across several servers, and a backend consisting of a dynamic number of celery task workers fed by messages published to a RabbitMQ cluster. They also maintained a number of internal web services on nginx in front of Gunicorn and Node.js processes. Redis handled simple key and value stores, with logging handled by Graylog2 and ElasticSearch. However, they realized that no level of automation would be sufficient without an effective monitoring solution in place. They needed a tool that could provide immediate alerts when something was breaking and could be easily implemented into their environment.
Case Study
Pipeline Insight Case Study: YARCDATA
YarcData faced challenges in determining the conversion rates of prospects into customers through various marketing efforts and identifying the source of its leads. They wanted to know the percentage of opportunities in the sales pipeline that came from different marketing events, web downloads, or self-sourced sales opportunities. Additionally, they needed the ability to drill down into the data to guide where to allocate more marketing dollars based on the success of previous efforts. Previously, YarcData relied heavily on spreadsheets and Salesforce.com reports, which made it difficult to extract the exact information they needed. This reliance on spreadsheets represented about 70% of their data presentation.
