Managing brand consistency across teams and platforms is a complex challenge. Our client understands this and provides a cloud-based solution designed to streamline branding processes. Their platform enables businesses to create and manage custom brand guidelines, organize marketing teams, and share assets within a centralized environment.
As the platform evolved, so did the need for a robust monitoring solution to ensure peak performance across their cloud infrastructure. Reliability and scalability became essential to meet growing demands.
Key Challenges & Context
Managing a tech stack with both legacy systems and modern applications can feel like juggling a dozen balls at once, and that’s exactly what our client was facing. Their infrastructure was spread across AWS and GCP, with performance monitoring handled by multiple disconnected tools. Each tool provided a piece of the puzzle, but no single view helped them see the whole picture. This made it hard to identify and resolve issues quickly, especially with high daily traffic and a constant flow of logs. Problems in their PHP back-end or React front-end often went undetected until it was too late, leading to delays and a less-than-ideal user experience.
On top of that, the client’s Infrastructure as Code (IaC) implementation was only partial, leaving some systems manually managed and inconsistent. Without full observability over their entire environment, detecting the root causes of issues could take days. They needed a more integrated, scalable solution, that would streamline monitoring, give them clear insights into system health, and allow them to detect and resolve performance issues faster. It was clear that to stay ahead, they needed a unified, real-time monitoring solution to ensure everything worked smoothly, no matter how complex the environment.
Approach
We knew that solving the client’s challenge meant simplifying their entire monitoring experience. No more juggling multiple disconnected tools, and no more waiting for problems to snowball. Our goal was to create a seamless, unified solution that would provide real-time visibility across all their systems, whether legacy or cloud-based. Here’s how we approached it:
Step 1: Understanding the Client’s Needs
We started by getting to the core of what the client truly needed. This wasn’t just about adding more tools. We wanted to identify where the gaps were and make sure everything was connected. Through a comprehensive evaluation, we worked to:
- Gain a clear picture of their current monitoring landscape.
- Understand the challenges they faced with fragmented visibility across AWS and GCP.
- Identify key areas where monitoring and performance tracking were falling short.
Step 2: Implementing Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Next, we turned to automation to ensure consistency and scalability. We used Terraform to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC), allowing us to:
- Automate the deployment of monitoring agents across all systems.
- Set up consistent monitoring rules that could easily scale with their growing infrastructure.
- Eliminate manual setup and configuration errors, ensuring reliability across both cloud environments.
Step 3: Real-Time Visibility with Datadog
We needed to give the client’s team immediate insights into their infrastructure performance. By integrating Datadog, we provided them with:
- A single, unified dashboard that tracked performance across AWS, GCP, and legacy systems.
- Real-time data for faster troubleshooting and quicker identification of issues.
- Actionable insights that helped the team resolve problems before they impacted users.
Step 4: Centralized Log Collection
Finally, we tackled the massive volume of logs generated daily. To make error tracking more efficient, we implemented centralized log aggregation, which allowed the client’s engineers to:
- Collect and analyze logs from all systems in one place.
- Spot patterns and trends more easily, helping them identify root causes faster.
- Reduce time spent troubleshooting and minimize downtime.
Benefits
The results of this approach were immediately clear. Our solution solved the initial problems and transformed how the client operated on a day-to-day basis. With Datadog’s implementation, their team could now stay ahead of issues, optimize resources, and ensure that the infrastructure kept running smoothly.
Here’s how our solution made a difference:
1. Better Visibility, Better Performance
The client now had an integrated view of both their AWS and GCP environments. This allowed their teams to:
- See everything: From legacy systems to the newest tech, they gained full visibility of every part of the infrastructure.
- Spot issues fast: Spike in traffic or a hidden performance bottleneck? The teams could immediately pinpoint the cause and take action.
2. Faster Issue Resolution
With a better monitoring system and centralized logs, the team could quickly detect and resolve performance issues. By centralizing logs and automating monitoring, the client is able to:
- Diagnose problems instantly: No more digging through scattered logs, the team can now identify issues in a snap.
- Resolve issues faster: With real-time alerts, they can address problems before they even affected customers.
3. Saving Costs, Gaining Efficiency
Cloud costs can quickly spiral out of control, especially when monitoring is fragmented and inefficient. With our solution, the client can now:
- Cut cloud expenses: By optimizing how resources were used, they avoided overprovisioning and wasted resources.
- Boost efficiency: Automation helped streamline workflows, saving both time and money while keeping things running smoothly.
4. Centralized Logs for Faster Troubleshooting
With all logs collected in one place, engineers had quicker access to critical data during incidents. They can now:
- Troubleshoot in record time: No more hunting through different systems — everything was in one spot, ready to go.
- Cut downtime: Engineers could quickly find patterns and resolve issues, minimizing any disruptions to users.
5. Scalable, Future-Proof Infrastructure
Growth is hard enough without having to worry about whether your systems can keep up. With our approach, the client’s infrastructure became:
- Easily scalable: As their needs grew, the monitoring system scaled with them (no additional manual work required).
- Ready for the future: Our solution was designed to evolve with their business, handling new technologies and expanding systems without a hitch.
In the end, our solution did more than just check the boxes for monitoring. It empowered the client to focus on what really matters: their growth.