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Improving Application Performance and DevOps Collaboration with a Unified Monitoring Platform
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Computer Vision
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
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.
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 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
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