Engineering teams constantly balance the need for speed and standardization, but achieving both goals at the same time often feels impossible. Developers’ dependence on platform engineers for support with infrastructure and tooling can create bottlenecks for routine operational tasks such as provisioning environments, troubleshooting incidents, and managing deployments. Additionally, as organizations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to ensure that every new service, infrastructure request, and system update aligns with best practices. Developers face long wait times for approvals, while platform teams struggle with manual, repetitive tasks that could be automated. Without an efficient process in place, misconfigurations, inconsistencies, and security gaps become inevitable.
Self-Service Actions in Datadog Software Catalog directly address these challenges by giving developers the tools to act independently while ensuring alignment with organizational standards for security, compliance, and reliability. Platform teams can now create standardized templates through Datadog App Builder so that developers can take action without leaving Datadog.
In this post, we’ll explain how Self-Service Actions can help teams:
- Easily provision cloud infrastructure
- Manage infrastructure with increased efficiency and security
- Accelerate remediation and incident resolution
- Scaffold new services with embedded best practices
- Extend and customize existing tooling
Easily provision cloud infrastructure
Traditionally, provisioning infrastructure such as databases, compute instances, and Kubernetes clusters is a lengthy process that involves multiple teams, manual approvals, and security checks. These steps not only slow down development but also increase the risk of misconfigurations and infrastructure drift. A simple request for an Amazon S3 bucket or PostgreSQL database can take days due to approvals, security checks, and platform team intervention.
With Self-Service Actions, developers can provision cloud resources instantly through pre-approved, standardized infrastructure templates. Developers can:
- Select from a catalog of infrastructure templates (for example, Kubernetes clusters, Amazon RDS databases, S3 buckets)
- Automatically apply security policies and governance rules, reducing misconfigurations
- Enable automatic deprovisioning to prevent resource waste
- Use infrastructure as code (IaC) for consistency, version tracking, and auditability
Manage infrastructure with increased efficiency and security
Managing infrastructure often involves repetitive and error-prone manual tasks. Developers traditionally have to navigate multiple consoles or command-line interfaces to perform simple actions such as restarting services or managing message queues.
Self-Service Actions help teams move faster by making common infrastructure tasks available directly from the platform that developers already use to monitor and troubleshoot their systems. With clear permissions and a single click, developers can take safe, direct action—without leaving Datadog or breaking their flow.
Let’s use an example of Amazon SQS queues. When a downstream service recovers, developers often need to redrive messages from a dead-letter queue. With App Builder, platform engineers can create a simple interface for developers to peek, purge, or redrive queues—all without opening the AWS console. This functionality reduces context switching and helps teams resolve issues quickly while using the data they already trust in Datadog.
Accelerate remediation and incident resolution
When incidents occur, developers often lack the context or tools to efficiently diagnose and resolve issues. They might need to escalate problems to site reliability engineers (SREs), a process that delays resolution.
Self-Service Actions place diagnostic tools, runbooks, and automated remediation functionality directly in developers’ hands. Teams can instantly trigger remediation actions (such as restarting failed services or scaling resources), access contextual runbooks alongside incident dashboards, and initiate automated rollbacks or escalations in Datadog On-Call.
With self-service remediation, developers can resolve incidents faster and improve overall reliability while reducing the workload on platform and SRE teams.
Scaffold services with embedded best practices
Launching new microservices typically involves tedious manual steps, delays, and frequent handoffs between teams. Imagine if developers could instantly set up new services with all your organization’s best practices included—no waiting, no back-and-forth.
Platform engineers define reusable templates (also known as scaffolding) directly within their source-code management (SCM) tools such as GitHub or GitLab, packaging everything required to successfully launch a microservice. These templates typically include skeleton projects that contain essential source code, dependencies, automated CI/CD pipelines, preconfigured observability settings (such as monitors, logs, and service level objectives [SLOs]), and built-in security policies. By connecting their SCM repositories to Datadog through our integrations, platform engineers make these templates easily discoverable. Developers can then quickly locate and select the right template in Datadog to rapidly create new, compliant services.
One example is the Scaffolder app, which helps developers create new software components from template repositories. Developers can quickly generate a new repository or a pull request (PR) based on the provided data and the template.
Extend and customize existing tooling
Every organization operates differently, with unique processes, tooling, and standards. To meet this range of needs, Self-Service Actions provide extensive flexibility and customization.
Teams can easily adapt their workflows to align with their existing infrastructure and operational practices. Whether they need to automate approvals, build custom user interfaces, or integrate with essential tools such as Terraform, Kubernetes, or PagerDuty, Datadog offers the necessary functionality. As a result, organizations aren’t forced to change their processes. Instead, Datadog enhances and fits naturally into their existing ecosystem.
Get started with Self-Service Actions today
Self-Service Actions in Software Catalog reduce friction in service creation, remediation, infrastructure provisioning, and deployments. As a result, developers can work faster without sacrificing security, observability, reliability, or governance. To get started, see the Self-Service Actions documentation.
If you don’t already have a Datadog account, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial.