How AVM Enhances Operational Excellence with Datadog

AVM Consulting helps businesses improve reliability, security, and cost management using Datadog. By auditing systems, implementing better monitoring, and optimizing costs, AVM enables clients like Allstate to achieve full visibility and faster incident resolution.

Key Takeaways:

• Improved Monitoring: Full-stack visibility across production, testing, and CI/CD environments.
• Security Integration: Unified monitoring with tools like Datadog Watchdog for threat detection and compliance.
• Cost Savings: Improved cloud cost efficiency through strategic resource management and intelligent tagging.

With AVM’s phased rollout, companies reduce downtime, improve performance, and save on cloud expenses, letting teams focus on growth instead of troubleshooting.

Datadog Integration Process

Initial Analysis

AVM starts by auditing the infrastructure to pinpoint gaps in coverage, performance issues, alert misconfigurations, and dashboard inefficiencies. This review includes cloud services, Kubernetes, Kafka, application performance, security, costs, and DevOps metrics. For example, during a project with Allstate, AVM discovered that Datadog was already in use but not being used to its full potential. Based on these findings, AVM develops a phased rollout plan tailored to the client’s needs, aiming to improve observability and shorten mean-time-to-resolution.

Custom Implementation

Next, AVM designs and executes a phased implementation plan that includes Real User Monitoring, synthetic tests, centralized logging, and unified metrics. They establish clear tagging standards to ensure consistent metrics and create streamlined dashboards. The rollout begins in the production environment and then expands to test, development, and CI/CD environments. This approach minimizes disruptions while improving overall observability.

Datadog Overview

Security and Threat Management

After rolling out its phased implementation, AVM secures environments using Datadog’s advanced threat management tools.

Unified Security Monitoring

As part of this rollout, AVM integrates Datadog Watchdog and other security features with existing monitoring systems, creating a single platform for both security and performance data. This setup automates the scanning and classification of sensitive information – like credit card and banking data – using pre-set PCI-DSS and similar rule sets. By combining security with observability, AVM improves visibility while simplifying operations. These features are then expanded to include proactive threat detection.

“Watchdog helps our teams focus on the signals that matter by surfacing events that typically aren’t caught by traditional monitors. Looking at Watchdog every morning helps me gain a better understanding of everything happening across our entire technology stack. With the help of Root Cause Analysis, we have all the vital information we need so that our teams are able to investigate and address business-critical issues quickly and efficiently.” – Brent Montague, Site Reliability Architect at Cvent

Proactive Threat Detection

Building on Datadog’s Watchdog and leveraging OpenTelemetry standards, AVM develops thorough detection capabilities:

• Automated scanning of logs, traces, and events to identify sensitive data
• Pre-set PCI-DSS and similar rule sets to minimize compliance risks
• Correlation of security and performance events for quicker root cause analysis

This strategy supports Gartner‘s projection that by 2026, 70% of organizations effectively using observability will make decisions faster.

Infrastructure Monitoring

AVM enhances Datadog observability by extending it to infrastructure, offering insights tailored for complex enterprise setups.

Multi-Environment Monitoring

For Allstate, AVM implemented a monitoring system that covered multiple environments. Using Datadog’s tools, they established:

• End-to-end monitoring: Coverage across production, testing, development, and CI/CD pipelines. This included user experience checks, synthetic tests, and tracking infrastructure and application performance.

This setup goes beyond just monitoring production. By including test, development, and CI/CD environments, teams can detect and fix problems earlier in the development process. This reduces the chances of issues reaching production.

Alert System Setup

AVM’s alerting strategy focuses on delivering relevant and actionable notifications, avoiding unnecessary noise while ensuring critical problems are addressed promptly:

• Key metrics monitored: CPU, memory, disk usage, response times, error rates, cloud services, database performance, latency, and transaction success rates.
• Advanced detection tools: AI-based anomaly alerts, performance predictions, custom metrics, standardized tagging, and chaos testing to assess system resilience.

This structured system enables teams to identify and resolve critical incidents quickly and efficiently.

Cost Management

AVM takes Datadog beyond system health monitoring, using it to improve cloud spending efficiency.

Cost Tracking

AVM leverages Datadog’s cost management tools to help teams manage cloud expenses effectively. With these tools, teams can:

• Monitor spending by resource type.
• Track cost changes from week to week.
• Spot unexpected spikes, like a feature-flag evaluation consuming 1.5% of CPU via Continuous Profiler.
• Identify areas for optimization to reduce waste.

When anomalies in spending are detected, AVM uses focused analysis to adjust resource allocation.

Resource Usage Analysis

AVM enhances cost allocation by extending tags and auditing dashboards to uncover inefficiencies. This approach enables precise adjustments:

• AVM revamped a costly metrics aggregation process, improving CPU use and reducing the number of active replicas.
• By configuring rack awareness for Kafka clients, AVM significantly reduced cross-zone data transfers, leading to substantial annual cost savings.
• Through detailed audits and standardized tagging, AVM ensures clients focus on essential metrics, including application performance, security, cloud costs, and DevOps.

These strategies have delivered impressive results, including significant annual cloud cost savings. By providing direct access to cost data, engineers can focus their efforts on the most impactful optimizations.

Client Success Examples

After refining spending strategies, AVM turned its focus to improving reliability and response times. Here’s how their clients saw measurable improvements. By combining visibility tools with cost optimizations, AVM’s case studies highlight real-world results.

System Reliability Results

Allstate achieved enhanced system reliability through comprehensive monitoring tools that provided full-stack visibility. Using a phased rollout approach, they gained deeper insights into their systems and improved overall reliability.

Issue Resolution Times

In addition to improving uptime, AVM’s updates accelerated incident response by implementing:

• Custom dashboards for quick issue detection
• Complete request tracing across systems
• Smarter alert thresholds to highlight critical issues

These changes helped Allstate significantly reduce the time needed to resolve incidents.

Source: Allstate – AVM Consulting

Conclusion

Allstate’s experience with AVM’s Datadog deployment highlights clear improvements in reliability, security, and cost management. Their ability to achieve end-to-end traceability across production, testing, and CI/CD environments significantly reduced critical incidents by identifying issues earlier.

These advancements allow teams to spend more time on growth and less on resolving problems. By combining monitoring, security measures, and cost oversight, AVM helps businesses maintain efficient, scalable operations in today’s fast-paced tech environment.