Microsoft Teams is deeply embedded in many organizations’ workflows, acting as a hub to both communicate and collect information about issues and ongoing projects. However, as with most communication platforms, it can be challenging to context-switch between conversations, tickets, and monitoring data when troubleshooting collaboratively.
With the Datadog Microsoft Teams integration, you can easily access critical observability insights and take action on them without leaving Teams. The Teams integration enables you to receive notifications for critical issues and begin triaging them in the platform. To handle issues of any size, you can even integrate Teams into your automated Datadog workflows, streamlining your engineering processes even further. Finally, you can leverage the Teams integration alongside Datadog’s 40+ Azure integrations.
In this post, we’ll explore how you can:
Quickly detect and respond to issues
Troubleshooting issues often requires engineers to juggle a variety of tools, from pagers and ticketing systems to monitoring platforms. Key information obtained from each of these tools—such as timelines, responder assignments, and status updates—then needs to be manually relayed over communication platforms such as Teams. This process adds to the multitude of solutions in use and can quickly become mentally taxing.
The Datadog Microsoft Teams integration makes it easy to receive critical information directly within your channels via monitor notifications. Organizations can securely connect Teams to Datadog through our tenant-based API integration, ensuring that your data is kept safe. Note that this is an update from the previous, webhook-based Office 365 Connector setup—you can find more information on how to migrate your existing Connector integrations in our documentation.
Once the Teams integration is enabled, you can easily receive monitor notifications in any team that the Datadog app has been added to. These alerts contain graphs of the activity that triggered the monitor, alongside information about when it began and which resources have been impacted. With a single click, you can then pivot to Datadog to view additional details about the monitor. Or, if you want to pause the monitor—during testing, for example—you can mute further notifications for a specified time frame.
If Teams alerts you to a significant issue that warrants immediate follow-up, you can easily create an incident and start triaging without leaving the platform. Datadog already streamlines incident response with features such as Incident Management and On Call. With the Teams integration, you can route information from all of these features directly into your channels and quickly act on it.
Let’s say you receive a notification within Teams of a spike in errors in your payments service, preventing users from being able to complete their transactions. To help you quickly kick off your investigation, you’re able to create an incident for the issue without leaving Teams.
Once you’ve created the incident, Datadog automatically generates a new team within Microsoft Teams to centralize incident communication. Here, you can find links to the incident page in Datadog and easily communicate key updates to relevant stakeholders and responders. You can even drop visualizations from Datadog directly in the nested conversations. In this instance, you could give responders context for the incident via a timeseries graph showing the historical error rate for your payment service.
Automate complex workflows using Teams
Teams is already a critical part of many engineering teams’ day-to-day workflows, often serving as a central resource for communicating important project decisions and resources. By enabling you to automate critical Teams tasks, Datadog Workflow Automation helps you integrate Teams into these workflows even further while simultaneously streamlining your processes. You can send status updates to your engineers as issues are detected or remediated, or even solicit feedback on which steps to take next. These options enable you to keep other parties in the loop without needing to pivot away from the rest of your work.
For example, let’s say that you’re creating a workflow designed to handle cases where a Datadog detection rule has identified suspicious activity. Workflows are capable of automatically blocking users who are displaying potentially malicious behavior. However, you’d like to add an extra layer of security to prevent your workflow from accidentally denying access to a trusted user. To do so, you can add a Teams action to your workflow that sends a message to the relevant engineers detailing the issue. This notification enables them to choose whether or not to block the user—which they can do without ever leaving the conversation.
To get started, you can view pre-built Teams actions within the Action Catalog or filter from them from the pop-up menu when building a new workflow. For organizations running workloads on Microsoft Azure, engineers can use these options alongside nearly 80 Azure actions to create complex, automated workflows for their cloud resources. You can even access templates designed to handle common processes that already include Teams actions. These templates help you quickly notify responders while performing tasks such as VM reboots and alert triage.
Get started with the Datadog Microsoft Teams integration
While communication platforms such as Teams are a critical tool in many engineering organizations, context switching and tool sprawl can make relaying information difficult. With comprehensive incident response features and powerful workflow building blocks, the Datadog Microsoft Teams integration helps you consolidate and streamline your communication processes.
You can get started with the Teams integration today using our documentation. Or, if you’re not yet a Datadog user, you can try out these features by signing up for a 14-day free trial.
