Whether companies want to modernize, expand their presence, or reduce downtime, Datadog brings powerful observability capabilities together to help companies drill down into what’s going on in their environments. With a growing number of customers using Microsoft Azure services, Datadog moved from creating its first Azure monitoring solution in 2015 to migrating portions of its software-as-a-service (SaaS) workloads to Azure. Datadog is also using Linux on Azure to tap into optimized production processes and additional scalability as an Azure Native ISV Service for companies to enjoy a seamless customer experience. Datadog can push new products and services live and scale up or down as needed in a matter of minutes, and it’s growing not just steadily but rapidly with several new features in the pipeline.
Many companies that have a presence in the cloud use an observability solution to keep their systems and servers running smoothly and securely. Thousands of businesses around the world, including more than half of the Fortune 500, are proud to call that solution Datadog. The industry-leading monitoring and security platform is used by DevOps, security, and business teams to unlock visibility into their companies’ infrastructure, applications, databases, and more. With portions of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor’s workloads running on Microsoft Azure, Datadog’s developers are extending the platform’s technological prowess by using Linux on Azure to ensure they are providing exceptional customer experiences every time. It’s all thanks to the processing, storage, and networking capabilities of the Azure cloud platform.
“We’re running very large Kubernetes clusters, a large number of nodes, and many Azure virtual machines, so we constantly push the limits, but Azure is extremely fast to adapt.”
Benjamin Pineau, Senior Software Engineer, Datadog
Following customers to Azure
Based in the heart of New York City, cloud-native software company Datadog goes straight to the core of its customers’ operations to help them gain critical oversight of their infrastructure. Used and trusted by companies across all industries and regions, the Datadog monitoring platform integrates seamlessly with customers’ cloud and hybrid environments. It ingests data, layers on unique Datadog-generated metrics, and presents customers with out-of-the-box dashboards, visualizations, and other actionable monitoring capabilities.
Companies take advantage of these assets to address performance issues, reduce downtime, and improve customer experiences. “We are ingesting, processing, and storing trillions of data points and logs every day, so we depend a lot on our cloud provider to provide good processing power, storage, and networking for performing at scale,” says Benjamin Pineau, Senior Software Engineer at Datadog.
Many enterprise-level Datadog customers use Azure services, which sparked the creation of the company’s first Azure monitoring solution for Azure Virtual Machines in 2015. Shortly after, Datadog expanded to logs and application performance monitoring for Azure. In 2020, it was one of the first independent software vendors (ISVs) to release an Azure-native ISV Service, working closely with Microsoft engineering teams to embed Datadog natively into the Azure portal.
To continue making it easier for Azure users to monitor their environments with Datadog and coordinate better with Microsoft, the company opted to migrate portions of its observability platform to Azure and sell the solution through Azure Marketplace. “We hear from our customers that they want to use Azure, and they want to use Datadog to monitor their Azure environments, so that’s what’s pulling us in,” says Daria Zhao, Product Marketing Manager for Azure Integrations at Datadog.
Seamlessly supporting existing configurations and ensuring on-time availability
For its Azure-based customers, Datadog pulls enhanced telemetry data from Azure Monitor and collects additional metrics across all of the customer’s Azure services, including Azure App Service, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and Azure Functions. This massive amount of data is enriched with data from more than 600 integrations so customers can see across all their systems, apps, and services. This is a fundamental part of the company’s wide-spanning Linux-based infrastructure. With strong security and support from Microsoft for a vast and dynamic environment, Datadog has been able to adapt quickly to customer demand and push new products and services live in a matter of minutes. The data-centric company has also prioritized security and compliance since day one and found that Azure Blob Storage fully complied with its requirements for encryption at rest and on the fly.
To ensure it can always deliver on time, Datadog works closely with technical account managers from Microsoft to resolve scalability challenges and optimize its production processes. “We have everything configured for autoscaling and Azure will always adapt to our needs, upping capacity by several hundreds of high-memory instances to ingest a spike and then slowing back down in a matter of minutes,” says Pineau.
For additional flexibility, Datadog developers use the API Apps feature of Azure App Service to automate the creation of Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets that boost reliability and cost optimization. “With API Apps, instead of having developers go into a lengthy process of creating cloud resources manually or bringing resources down if they change the configuration, they can just have a cloud resource automatically created for them,” says Pineau. “We can also compute the resource needs of several applications and choose to expand a given virtual machine and provide more resources in a way that helps with resource optimization.”
Datadog does this all while running close to its customers—a move that required its cloud provider of choice to have a wide presence across multiple regions. “That agility and availability is something that the large choice of datacenters offered by Azure will help us with,” says Pineau. “We’re running very large Kubernetes clusters, a large number of nodes, and many Azure virtual machines, so we constantly push the limits, but Azure is extremely fast to adapt.”
“An excellent experience”
Today, the Datadog platform monitors and captures operational data for all major Azure services, meeting customers exactly where they are. The company cites Azure Virtual Machines, App Service, and Azure SQL Database as the most popular services that customers monitor using its platform today. Datadog also strives to be a launch partner for new Azure services and expansions, as seen with its recent move to support Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL integrations, which was announced at Microsoft Ignite in 2022.
“We collaborate a lot with Microsoft to create the most value-unlocking solution sets for customers on cloud and in hybrid environments,” says Zhao. “For example, we know Azure Arc has been a big focus for Microsoft, so we launched our Azure Arc integration hand in hand with the Azure Arc team.” With this newest integration, customers can now use tags and other critical metadata from Azure Arc for streamlined monitoring, visualizations, alerting, and troubleshooting across on-premises, multicloud, and hybrid infrastructures.
As it grows its SaaS platform, Datadog is also expanding its use of Azure internally, tapping into a significant number of Linux virtual machines in Azure. It’s growing not just steadily but rapidly. Two years ago, it didn’t have anything in Azure, but every month inspires further evolution, including adding more Kubernetes clusters within its Azure environment. As Pineau notes, “Working in Azure has been an excellent experience.”
Moving forward with highly satisfied customers and high growth potential
Since migrating portions of its workloads to Azure, Datadog hasn’t just upgraded its existing capabilities and won over new customers, it’s also gained a new perspective on supporting business continuity and resiliency. “While migrating to Azure, we designed a new way to think about failure demands and isolation, leaning into concepts that Azure explores, such as grouping resources,” explains Pineau.
Datadog’s native Azure integration remains a strong draw for customers, letting them set up and manage Datadog within the Azure portal. “Our customers don’t have to add a new workflow or worry about billing because it all gets consolidated with Azure,” says Zhao. “I think that really speaks to our partnership with Microsoft. We work closely together to develop solutions for Azure customers that help them accelerate their cloud adoption journeys and build confidently on modern architectures.”
Looking ahead, Datadog is projecting continued growth, benefiting both its in-house developers and customers’ operations teams. Upcoming features include an enhanced onboarding experience for enterprise customers with multiple-subscription accounts on Azure, improved support for Azure managed databases and SQL database monitoring, and even more single clickthrough workflows and out-of-the-box dashboards to enable enterprise-scale monitoring for Azure in minutes.
“Whether a customer’s new to the cloud or building cloud-native applications on Azure, the ‘better together’ value we unlock with Microsoft and Datadog combined isn’t just about turning a new service on,” says Zhao. “It’s about the confidence to turn an old service off and truly realize the value of their cloud investments.”
“We have everything configured for autoscaling and Azure will always adapt to our needs, upping capacity by several hundreds of high-memory instances to ingest a spike and then slowing back down in a matter of minutes.”
Benjamin Pineau, Senior Software Engineer, Datadog
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