In a culture based on innovation and competition, an increasing number of businesses are migrating to the cloud for its flexibility, efficiency, and strategic value. But to fully realize the value of the cloud, organizations need to tightly monitor and optimize the performance of their applications, network, and infrastructure. With an observability solution, like Datadog, organizations can proactively avoid issues by measuring their system’s current state while implementing changes.
Let’s talk about observability
Observability is the ability to measure a current state of a system by examining its output. In other words, to increase observability, organizations need to implement a monitoring tool that requires insights from the three pillars of observability: metrics, event logs, and traces.
Datadog is a monitoring and analytics tool/platform that offers cloud monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, and application performance monitoring. The tool provides technology teams with detailed visualizations of real-time performance metrics to understand organizations’ observability and the “why” behind disruptions in complex systems. The following will explore how you can use Datadog to generate metrics, event logs, and traces.
Metrics: Datadog supports several types of metrics such as count, gauge, rate, distribution, and histogram that will fit perfectly in each scenario and use cases. Organizations can ingest metrics to Datadog by using an agent or API.
Event Logs: Datadog collects logs across multiple sources such as your server, container, cloud environment, or application. It enables you to explore your logs and do an analysis through Datadog’s Log Explorer.
Traces: One of the Datadog core products, APM, offers end-to-end trace from collecting front end data along with a complete breakdown of backend activities.
Now, we will examine each type of monitoring to see how Datadog can help your team in your cloud environment:
Infrastructure Monitoring: Infrastructure monitoring is used to collect health and performance of servers, virtual machines, containers, databases, and other backend components. Engineers will need to install software, called an agent, on the host, which is a virtual machine in the cloud. The agent will collect all infrastructure metrics from the host and will send the data to Datadog for visualization and analysis. A few examples of some infrastructure metrics include Memory Utilization, CPU Utilization, Disk Space, and Storage Utilization.
Cloud Based Server Monitoring: Cloud Based Server Monitoring is similar to infrastructure monitoring, with the additional ability to correspond with infrastructure metrics. So, what features does Datadog’s cloud-based server monitoring provide? It allows you to filter your infrastructure health and examine it in a bird’s-eye view. Also, it lets you discover any hidden critical performance issues such as memory leakage by using Datadog’s dynamic visualization.
APM: Unlike infrastructure and cloud-based server monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM) observes the software application side of metrics. Datadog’s APM provides end-to-end tracking which means it follows every request from frontend to backend or database. By doing this, you can monitor every request, latency, and detect any errors early on. Datadog’s APM tool can evaluate your code base and determine the most time-consuming and resource-intensive method while reducing compute costs and service latency.
Conclusion
Imagine having a major outage and needing to manually track down the root cause of the problem. By the time the issue is resolved, customers and revenue are lost leaving your company to pick up the damaged pieces. As a Datadog Gold Partner, Infinitive works alongside Datadog to provide a dynamic one-stop shop monitoring tool to ensure efficient performance of your applications. To obtain a full understanding and transparency of your application, observability is critical. A proper monitoring tool can enhance communication between applications and/or infrastructure to optimize performance. Contact us today to learn how you can start your observability journey.
Contact Our Expert
Vivian Ng
Consultant, Cloud Computing
