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Ensuring a Highly Available and Highly Scalable Platform
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Braze, a cloud-based company that develops customer relationship management software, was facing challenges in scaling their systems and resolving customer support tickets. The company processes more than 8 billion API requests and sends more than 2.7 billion daily messages to a network of over 2.4 billion monthly active users. With a growing engineering organization, teams had different techniques and tools for evaluating the performance of their applications and scaling their systems. The organization needed a uniform way of determining whether provisioned infrastructure was appropriate for the traffic, forecasting future needs, and investigating performance-related issues. Additionally, many technical customer support tickets were escalated directly to the Product and DevOps engineering teams, effectively bypassing the Global Services and Support team when the questions were about performance, uptime, or throughput. This led to distractions for engineering and deprived Support and Success of the ability to quickly resolve customer tickets.
About The Customer
Braze is an American cloud-based company that develops customer relationship management software to help businesses with multichannel marketing. Its software is used by 2.5 billion users and processes approximately 1.5 billion messages per month. The company has more than 900 customers and continues to grow its employee headcount and customer base despite the pandemic. On a daily basis, Braze processes more than 8 billion API requests and sends more than 2.7 billion daily messages to a network of over 2.4 billion monthly active users. The company grew its employee headcount by 57% in 2019, ending the year with almost 500 employees.
The Solution
Braze adopted Datadog’s unified observability platform to standardize their engineering team’s scaling process and enable the support team to solve most customer tickets. Datadog is accessible to users of all technical levels—without the need for extensive onboarding or specialized query languages. Datadog has empowered Braze’s engineers to observe the state of that system, and rapidly identify and respond to state changes, via dashboards, monitors, and integrations with tools like Slack and Pagerduty. Each of the eight product teams has the same, standardized dashboards and monitors, which is important as Braze’s engineering organization continues to grow rapidly. The engineering team gave key customer-facing teams—Customer Success, and Global Services and Support—access to Datadog in order to quickly resolve customer problems.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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