Barak Shoushan
Addie Beach
Automating tasks can help you create more efficient processes and respond to issues faster. As the complexity of your automations grows, though, you’ll need to ensure that the data in your workflows and apps can be easily reused and augmented through data persistence. Many teams building automations turn to incorporating third-party solutions, such as S3 buckets, to manage their data. However, these platforms often come with extra costs and aren’t necessarily optimized for your automations, making data storage difficult to set up, update, and maintain.
Datadog Datastore gives you access to fully managed, consistent data storage for Datadog App Builder and Workflow Automation. Datastore integrates with the rest of the Datadog ecosystem, enabling fast, persistent storage without the need for external databases. With an easy-to-navigate UI, teams across your organization—regardless of technical background—can view and update data. Additionally, by accessing Datadog Action Catalog, you can easily use your Datastore data to build complex apps and workflows without leaving the Datadog platform. When combined with Datastore’s dynamic storage options and read-after-write consistency, these features make maintenance simple and reduce context switching.
There are many ways to enhance your apps and workflows with Datastore, such as storing service configuration data to help your teams quickly scale resources and historical log data to accelerate audits and postmortem analyses. In this post, we’ll use the example of creating a customized incident management app to explore how Datastore can help you:
- Dynamically manage data throughout Datadog
- Maintain a shared data layer from your workflows
- Create full-stack apps with data persistence
Dynamically manage data throughout Datadog
Datastore provides a variety of ways to create, access, and manage your data. Through the Datastore UI, you can quickly create new tables with flexible schema tailored to fit your needs. For example, Datastore can easily accommodate data entries with missing values by only requiring a key. You can also add or change your data through different methods, such as by uploading external files (e.g. CSV), editing JSON objects, or manually altering the raw text.
By integrating with Datadog Action Catalog, Datastore also gives you access to a collection of out-of-the-box actions that help you easily set up and manage your datastores via workflows and apps.
These actions make it easy to build complex automations using your data. Let’s say you want to build an incident management app that’s customized to your organization’s needs. Namely, you’d like to use data from Datadog Incident Management but incorporate extra information and processes that are specific to your teams. You also want to be able to add this app to service overview dashboards so that teams can go from identifying issues to troubleshooting them on the same page. With Datastore, you can make this app robust and reliable by integrating, updating, and persisting data within both your workflows and apps.
Maintain a shared data layer from your workflows
Let’s say that you already have a few basic incident response workflows within Workflow Automation that you’d like to integrate into your app. To create a seamless experience for responders using your app, you want these workflows to retain data and share it with each other. For example, say you have a triage workflow that starts the incident response process once it receives an incoming alert. Based on factors such as the type of problem and the services that are affected, the workflow assigns the issue a severity level. Once the triage process is finished, a workflow that creates a Jira ticket for the incident should then be able to access and incorporate the severity level. With Datastore, you can store data from the completed triage workflow within a table, then use it to populate the Jira ticket.
After you’ve completed your workflow and ran it a few times, you may decide to use the Datastore UI to make additional changes to your data entries or schema. For instance, you can add a field for responder contact information. Additionally, Datastore enables you to secure your tables within this UI. You can easily restrict access to certain users or organizations and control whether they can edit your data or schema. In this case, because your incident workflows handle critical, potentially sensitive data, you may also want to customize your table permissions to limit who can change this information.
Create full-stack apps with data persistence
In addition to helping you configure and enhance your workflows, Datastore also enables you to easily populate data from these flows into one unified app within App Builder and keep it up to date. Datastore’s actions give you access to the full range of CRUD operations, so you can add, fully or partially update, or delete entries as needed. Let’s say you want to be able to resolve incidents directly from your app. In addition to closing out the issue via a workflow, you can ensure the issue is removed from app’s list of active incidents by using the Delete Item action.
For further customization, you can use App Builder’s sorting and filtering capabilities to quickly organize data based on different characteristics. In this situation, you may want to filter incidents displayed within your app based on status, severity, service, or time, enabling you to highlight only active, critical issues.
You can also use template variables to easily scope the data in your app to a specific dashboard. Let’s say that the service overview dashboards you’re adding your app to each have a service variable. When you save your app widget on each dashboard, the template variable will automatically filter the incidents displayed to only those affecting the selected service. This enables teams to quickly access and take action on the incidents that are most relevant to them.
Start using Datadog Datastore today
With Datadog Datastore, you can easily access dynamic read-write data storage within Datadog. Because Datastore integrates directly with App Builder and Workflow Automation, you can use your data when building apps without leaving the Datadog platform, minimizing context switching.
You can get started with Datastore using our documentation. Or, if you’re new to Datadog, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial.
