Datadog > Case Studies > Monitoring Scales Alongside Blue State Digital’s Rapidly Growing Infrastructure

Monitoring Scales Alongside Blue State Digital’s Rapidly Growing Infrastructure

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Datadog

Tech Stack

Linux
PHP
MySQL
RabbitMQ
HAProxy
ElasticSearch

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Digital Expertise

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications
Software

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Business Operation

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance
Infrastructure Inspection

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
System Integration

About The Customer

Blue State Digital is a media strategy and technology firm that specializes in online fundraising, advocacy, social networking, and constituency development. It was founded by former staff of Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and provided technology services for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. The company was acquired by EveryAction in 2019. After successfully running the digital component of Obama for America’s 2012 Presidential campaign, BSD shifted their focus to further expanding their service offerings and the diversity of their client base. They provide input-forms, signup forms, and contribution forms on the front end, and the tools for building those forms on the back end.

The Challenge

Blue State Digital (BSD) had a complex stack with multiple tiers of web services, databases, and load balancers that relied on varied systems including Linux, PHP, MySQL, RabbitMQ, and more. They were also in the process of migrating sections of their infrastructure to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to further support rapid infrastructure growth. As BSD moved to a more dynamic cloud environment that included automated server provisioning, manually updating server counts, instrumentation and alerts were beginning to take up a lot of time and overhead. They needed a monitoring tool that would easily integrate with their existing technical setup and scale effortlessly alongside their infrastructure.

The Solution

BSD chose Datadog as their monitoring tool. Datadog had a Chef cookbook and handler that allowed BSD to implement Datadog on their servers in an automated fashion. Datadog provided BSD with the push-driven metric collection tools that they needed in a solution that was integrated effortlessly into other systems. Datadog’s integration with StatsD allowed BSD to continue gathering metrics from a system that his team understood well. Datadog automatically scales along with BSD’s rapidly growing infrastructure, saving their teams additional set-up time so they can redirect focus to other technical needs. BSD also uses Datadog’s Timeline View for their weekly operations team review and Datadog’s tagging feature to easily manipulate data by grouping and aggregating metrics in any dimension wanted.

Operational Impact

Datadog’s OOTB integrations support the varied parts of BSD’s complex stack, including key components such as HAProxy and ElasticSearch, allowing them to easily collect metrics from across their environment.
With Datadog’s Chef cookbook and handler, BSD can implement Datadog across all their servers in an automated, repeatable fashion.
Datadog automatically scales along with BSD’s rapidly growing infrastructure, saving their teams additional set-up time so they can redirect focus to other technical needs.
BSD leverages Datadog’s tagging to easily and efficiently group and sort through large volumes of metrics data, without any manual aggregation.

Quantitative Benefit