Observability Made Simple

As agencies transform their digital operations — expanding reliance on the cloud and adding new apps, integrations, and automations — their IT ecosystems become more complex. There are more places things can go wrong and more pressure to fix them quickly.

You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See

The task of monitoring these complex systems gets more complicated, too. “The question is, how do I know there’s an issue?” said Brian Mikkelsen, Vice President and General Manager at Datadog Public Sector. “Is it when the tickets start flowing, when complaints increase, when your leadership team asks why something isn’t working?” None of those options is ideal.

Datadog’s application performance management platform provides a real-time window into the digital environment, identifying performance and security issues — quickly. Its “full stack” hybrid infrastructure capability means everything from the back end to the front end is monitored and reported via infrastructure metrics, application performance traces, and correlated logs.

With its visual user interface, the platform enables IT teams and business-side users to see what’s happening. “Business leaders face a difficult challenge because they’re expected to know what’s going on, but don’t always have the time or technical expertise to interpret the data,” Mikkelsen said. “Datadog solves this issue with customizable views for every level of an organization.”

Simplify, Simplify

As a software-as-a-service platform, Datadog can be up and running quickly without the need for professional services. It empowers customers to consolidate tools, reduce complexity, and have visibility across the stack for all teams and stakeholders.

“Monitoring multiple systems with disparate tools can be impossibly complex,” he added. “Datadog provides a unified solution that lets you monitor the health and performance of your infrastructure, applications, networks, users’ experiences and more across your cloud environment, all from a single platform.”

Handling Transformation

Mikkelsen’s advice for digital transformation:

• Align teams around the most important priorities. Know what you want to accomplish.
• Create baselines. Assess the existing system’s performance and determine a measurable baseline so you can track improvement.
• Avoid the monolithic beast. Break projects into measurable components. Don’t do everything at once.
• Accept that things will break. Have a mitigation plan in advance. Learn from every outage and be humble.

How Datadog Helps Government Agencies

Datadog is FedRAMP® authorized at the moderate impact level and meets the enhanced security and compliance needs of its public-sector customers. Its platform integrates seamlessly with major cloud providers including AWS, GCP, and Microsoft Azure, so agencies collaborating across shared, distributed infrastructures have full visibility into any stack, any app, at any scale, anywhere.

This article appears in our Guide, “Unpacking Digital Transformation.” To read more about how agencies are getting the most out of their modernization and transformation efforts, download the guide.

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