“We moved from a shared environment with very limited control to a 95% cloud-based environment with actual data, insights, and monitoring capabilities.”
Datam
Product
Datadog
Employees
200
Industry
IT Services and IT Consulting
Executive Summary
Like so many organisations, Datam needed to do more for less and was looking for a new smarter system that would provide better monitoring and insights. Now more than ever it is imperative to provide customers with smarter, data-driven communications made possible by accessing leading-edge technology.
The challenge
Datam provides solutions and services that connect leading organisations across multiple verticals like Banking, Finance, Utilities and Government with their customers. These interactions include statements, invoices, regulatory communications, and personalised marketing, all delivered through the channels that their customers prefer to engage in. This requires a platform which has evolved over years. It was clear to the business that its technology tools were a barrier to working efficiently and delivering the best service to both customers and themselves.
Datam needed to gain control and access to their own environment. Logging and monitoring was spread across legacy tools and limited to email alerts and/or logs spread across servers that required bespoke access mechanisms. There wasn’t a coherent process and they had to make do with homemade scripts where available.
“Historically, Datam had very little control over what data they were being fed.”
Datam was reliant on a third-party provider for any information required on their own systems, with no ability to make improvements and no knowledge transfer. The time had come for them to take control and gain visibility to deliver the best results for their business and their customers.
The Solution
Datam’s chosen strategy was to move to the cloud and gain complete control of their own environment with much greater visibility.
“We moved from a shared environment with very limited control to a 95% cloud-based environment with actual data, insights, and monitoring capabilities.”
Datam chose Datadog as the foundation for improved visibility of their environment, with access to dashboards and IT services that could quickly provide the data and insights they needed.
The Results
With Datadog, the realised benefit comes from using the platform and being able to answer any questions about your environment effortlessly. It closes the loop and is now no longer an all-day exercise to figure out where things are going wrong— it is faster and provides far better information. Datadog is a great tool to shut down issues that occur on the customer site rather than on Datam’s end with the ability to share dashboards to instantly close any arguments. Previously, it would have escalated to developers and required Datam’s IT department to keep a log file in order to have any visibility of what was going on. Datam can now pick up on issues before the customers do, which now allows Service Delivery Managers to no longer have these concerns.
“We no longer get the pass the parcel service, being constantly handed over from one person to the next. DDS IT sees the problem through to get a result, and it’s a much better process.”
There is now an automatic response to any urgent matters and is no longer just a priority number. Requests can be dealt with quickly, and in some instances, it can be worked on before having even been raised by customers. DDS IT has a better understanding of the business impact.
One of the outcomes Datam wanted is to have transparency and add proactiveness to the way they dealt with patches. Datam’s patching schedule is now available on a Datadog dashboard. This means that there is no longer a massive overhead on letting it’s customers know when patching is scheduled and puts the responsibility on the engineer requiring a patch to schedule it appropriately. This in turn allows the Change Manager to approve patching requests faster, which results in far less margin for error and much greater consistency.
It has been a great experience working with both DDS IT and Datadog, compared with what Datam used in the past. It is a remarkable improvement with full visibility of their environment, allowing for quick resolution to any incidents.