Continuously monitoring cloud infrastructures with Datadog

Monitoring cloud infrastructures is essential

Cloud architectures pose new challenges for IT because cloud applications are usually widely distributed. IT is no longer limited to a few, potentially self-operated, data centres. Native cloud systems are often not just territorial, but also widely distributed in terms of vendors, platforms and technologies.

Because of the focus on IT as a central component for business success, it’s critical to have all the information about a complex cloud infrastructure’s multitude of components in view at all times. However, this is significantly more complex to do than in classic monolithic environments due to the heterogeneous nature of cloud applications and their wide distribution.

Continuously monitoring every aspect of an application – infrastructure, platforms, applications or APIs, for example – is essential for the following reasons, among others:

• It helps to identify risks before they become a problem
• It helps to recognise overarching correlations
• It provides end-to-end monitoring and fault analysis for every part of the cloud
• It provides live security and performance monitoring and analysis
• It analyses user and application behaviour
• It ensures that alerts are given in the event of risk

Although in-house development of such a solution is possible with open-source tools such as Elasticsearch, Grafana and so on, our experience shows that the effort involved is immense, especially with regard to long-term maintenance. That said, such a solution doesn’t attain the quality and scope of commercial products.

In order to be able to offer our customers in the cloud environment a professional solution for monitoring and alerting, we’ve decided to partner with Datadog.

Why did we choose to partner with Datadog?

We see ourselves as a highly committed enabler for our customers, especially in terms of high-quality delivery capability. Datadog shares our passion and commitment.

Furthermore, we were particularly impressed by the following features of the Datadog platform:

Quick and easy set-up

Datadog comes with over 400 connectors so that almost every common system and technology can be connected in the shortest amount of time.

Scalable platform

The Datadog platform allows you to start with a small set-up and to scale volumes and features using the application landscape. This keeps the investment costs low, especially at the beginning, without limiting your options in later stages of expansion.

Comprehensive features

Datadog offers a comprehensive set of features for monitoring and analysis. These include:

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Container monitoring
• Serverless monitoring
• Log management
• Application monitoring
• Network monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Security and compliance monitoring
• Incident management

What does the partnership mean for our customers, for Datadog and for adesso?

Datadog is making quite an impression in the cloud-native monitoring and alerting sector. The use of a professional solution in this area allows us and our customers to focus on the technical core processes and their implementation. At the same time, a holistic view of the entire system is available from the start. This provides the security and freedom with which the cloud transformation can be driven forward in a concentrated manner without losing sight of the bigger picture.

What happens next?

Since Datadog works in close cooperation with Google (GCP) and Amazon (AWS), it’s obvious that adesso will recommend Datadog as a monitoring and alerting solution in cloud projects in the future.

In the Line of Business Banking, for example, Datadog will become the preferred monitoring and alerting solution for cloud projects. Datadog is used as the standard monitoring and alerting solution in projects based on the ‘adesso financial platform’.

We are currently examining how adesso can benefit from Datadog in the monitoring of existing customer platforms or applications within the scope of application maintenance.

Nevertheless, choosing a technology always depends on the context. For our customers in particular, this means that we will continue to decide which monitoring and alerting solution best meets the requirements within the context of the respective project on a case-by-case basis. We’re remaining vendor independent in this respect.

On the other hand, all parties involved in projects in which the Datadog solution is used will of course benefit from our close cooperation with Datadog.

We’re looking forward to working very closely with our new partner and to new exciting projects.

Would you like to learn more about exciting topics from the world of adesso? Then check out our latest blog posts.