There’s no rest for this fast-moving and rapidly growing monitoring company
Last week Datadog was in the news trying to attack the market share of monitoring vendor New Relic. While that may seem like industry shenanigans, it marked a very interesting point in time when two vendors, who had previously been happy to compete in a friendly manner, announced all-out warfare and a race for each other’s customer base.
New Relic moved strongly into the infrastructure monitoring space, one that it didn’t previously cover, while Datadog made a corresponding move into application monitoring.
+ Also on Network World: Infrastructure monitoring products: Users pinpoint the best and worst features +
You’d have thought that Datadog would let that news settle in a little before ramping things up, but no such luck. This is a company firmly focused on growing rapidly, and today’s news is another incremental step in that direction. Datadog has announced a small, but actually pretty important piece of functionality that it promises will increase the efficiency of development and operations teams within organizations.
First, a little bit of context about how those teams normally work. Generally what happens is that when the operations team notices a performance issue with a particular application, they will raise a support ticket in whichever collaboration and bug-tracking platform they use, push that through to the relevant development team and let that team deal with the issue.
That all works fine. But what happens when the operations team is away at an offsite motivational weekend or simply at a bar celebrating their latest performance metrics? That ticket doesn’t get created, and the issue remains unresolved.
Integrating Datadog with JIRA
Step in Datadog, which is integrating its solution into Atlassian’s JIRA, a well-respected and widely adopted project management service. Under the integration, when a performance issue is noticed by Datadog within either an application or an infrastructure context, a support ticket is created, tagged, tracked and updated in JIRA.
The value proposition is obvious: Integrating JIRA and Datadog allows IT operations teams to track infrastructure concerns alongside these bug fixes in order to greatly reduce time between problem detection, service desk ticket creation, problem resolution and communication across departments. This integration actually joins another couple of existing integrations with Atlassian products that Datadog has—into HipChat, Atlassian’s team communication platform (which, for context, goes head to head with products such as Slack) as well as BitBucket, the Atlassian product that helps developers collaborate on the creation and management of code.
The great thing here is the context that is created by the integration. This isn’t just a case of creating a ticket and leaving it there in the ether, rather the ticket is created but also populated with pertinent information about the issues that have been identified. Thereafter, tickets are updated when new information about the particular issue comes to hand.
And customers seem to be (understandably) bullish about the opportunity:
“We’re very excited about Datadog’s new JIRA integration. It will allow us to fully automate the support workflow, from incident generation to change tracking,” said John Hayes, senior manager of Global Cloud Services at North Plains. “Allowing triggers to open and update tickets will remove duplication of effort and keep our support team updated on the latest state of our infrastructure.”
Good for Datadog, and good for Atlassian. I expect a response from New Relic in 3, 2, 1….
