Datadog, the Amazon Web Services third-party monitoring service, is now moving to meet increasing demand for metrics from Microsoft's Azure cloud.

Charles Babcock, Editor at Large, Cloud

July 11, 2016

3 Min Read
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Datadog is one of several third-party monitoring services that can tell customers what's going on with their workloads in the Amazon Web Services cloud. The company has announced that it's now brought the same capabilities to Microsoft's Azure cloud.

Datadog is a six-year-old company based in New York that's grown from 180 to 250 employees so far this year, according to Alex Rosemblat, vice president of marketing. It received $94.5 million in Series D funding led by Iconiq Capital on Jan. 12. Datadog currently has 3,500 enterprise customers, including Salesforce.com, Twilio, Airbnb, Netflix, WB Games, and Spotify. It tripled its revenues in 2015, Rosemblat said in an interview with InformationWeek.

The company was founded by engineers familiar with the movement toward agile, DevOps, and micro-services. Those approaches to programming were being adopted by developers at companies that were trying to speed up their software delivery.

"Any company that was operating 100s of servers in 2010 is easily managing 1,000s to 10,000s of units today. In other words, enterprises have replaced a few fairly static things with a lot more moving pieces," CEO Olivier Pomel wrote in a blog posted to the company website.

That change means that methods of monitoring the enterprise infrastructure need to change as well, and Datadog set out to produce such a system, as have New Relic, Splunk, AppDynamics, Manage Engine, and others. Datadog can now do so across both AWS and Azure cloud environments. Datadog will illustrate how its monitoring capabilities now apply to Azure at the Microsoft Partner Conference, which kicks off July 11 in Toronto.

Datadog now integrates with Microsoft's Azure Resource Manager, a service that became available in 2014 that launches virtual machines into the Azure cloud.

Datadog will now monitor individual virtual machines or a physical server with multiple virtual machines on it. It aggregates operational statistics and metrics from the virtual servers or hosts, stats that can includes events, such as the failure and restart of a VM, or a failed API call by a VM.

Datadog offers interactive dashboards for displaying the data that can highlight the spotting of a zombie -- a server that's been running continuously without doing anything for an extended period of time. Datadog users can tag their resources, then aggregate operational data around the tag. The data can include server log data collected by Splunk or performance data from a New Relic or AppDynamics performance monitoring system.

It can also integrate information from a load balancer, such as NGiNX.

[Want to see how big the cloud market is? Read Cloud Spending Will Top $37 Billion in 2016, IDC Reports.]

The Datadog system performs analytics oriented toward what IT managers want to know, not necessarily business managers, with some of that information presented on interactive dashboards as charts and graphs, according to the Datadog website.

Datadog collects "performance metrics and discrete events, such as server start and server stop and configuration changes" from Azure in the same way it does from AWS, Rosemblat said. It can monitor instances of SQL Server, Azure Resource Manager VMs, and what Microsoft calls its "classic" virtual machines -- those not launched via ARM. It can also monitor the VM hosts.

Datadog integrates with and presents data from the Windows operating system, Windows Management Instrumentation, Windows Event Viewer, and Microsoft's IIS web server. It also recognizes the output of the open source monitoring tool, StatsD, coming from a C# program.

Datadog subscriptions are $18 a month per monitored server, which may be a bare metal server on-premises or a virtual server in the cloud, Rosemblat said. Datadog added the Azure integrations, even though its customer base is still predominantly made up of AWS customers.

"We are starting to see more Azure customers and more demand for Azure monitoring," Rosemblat said.

About the Author(s)

Charles Babcock

Editor at Large, Cloud

Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek and author of Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution, a McGraw-Hill book. He is the former editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and former technology editor of Interactive Week. He is a graduate of Syracuse University where he obtained a bachelor's degree in journalism. He joined the publication in 2003.

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