Maintaining service availability is a challenge in today’s complex cloud environments. When a critical incident arises, the underlying cause can be buried in a sea of alerts from interconnected services and applications. Central operations teams often face an overload of disparate alerts, causing confusion, delayed incident response, alert fatigue, and redundant resolution efforts. These issues can negatively impact revenue and customer experience, especially during an outage.
Having an aggregation layer that brings together and connects all of your events from disparate tools can be key to sifting through the noise and speeding up incident resolution. Datadog Event Management, a foundational component of Datadog’s AIOps capabilities, collects alerts from both Datadog and third-party tools and centralizes them alongside observability data from all of your services and applications into a unified view. This not only helps teams understand the full context of an incident—thus accelerating the mean time to know or understand an incident—but also significantly cuts down on alert fatigue by consolidating and correlating alerts that are related. Datadog Event Management paints a complete picture of incidents, accelerating resolution times and enhancing the overall ability of responders to triage quickly and effectively.
In this post, we’ll walk through how Datadog Event Managements correlation enables your teams to:
- Unify your alerts and events from anywhere into one single view
- Reduce alert fatigue with correlation and deduplication of events
- Enhance alert context with service knowledge, ownership and observability data
- Accelerate remediation with automated triage workflows
- Integrate AIOps into your monitoring workflows
Unify your alerts and events from anywhere into one single view
As modern IT infrastructures become more complex, tool sprawl can cause an unmanageable amount of alerts from disparate tools, leading to increased operational overhead as teams must spend time manually filtering through them and routing them to the correct stakeholders. This noise can make it easy to miss more critical alerts, which often escalate into service disruptions.
Datadog Event Management centralizes third-party events, such as alerts and change events. This helps break down tool sprawl by providing a consolidated view into activity across your environment. For many technologies, Datadog provides out-of-the-box integrations to easily ingest events. Alternatively, you can submit events to Datadog’s REST API, or even via email. This allows teams to easily manage, group, filter, and analyze events in one view so you can take action faster.
The Events Explorer centralizes all events coming into Datadog in a single timeline. You can easily group or filter events by attribute, or use event analytics to visualize event data over time.
Reduce alert fatigue with AI-powered correlation and deduplication of events
When an issue arises, responders are often overwhelmed with information, particularly in complex environments where numerous systems and applications generate a high volume of alerts. This can lead to a decreased ability to prioritize and respond effectively to true incidents.
Datadog’s Event Management automatically processes, deduplicates, and correlates events from across your environment to help reduce overall noise and enable your teams to focus on what’s really important. Datadog provides multiple options for how to analyze and process events, including:
- Pattern Correlations: Set pattern-based correlations, or leverage one of the many suggested correlations tailored to your organization’s needs
- Intelligent Correlations: Use AI to automatically group events based on their relationships and underlying data to consolidate related events into one case
As you set up a correlation, you can quickly get a view of the overall impact it would have on your environment by either going to one of the suggested patterns directly or via the overview page. You can then customize and edit suggested correlations to suit your organization’s needs.
Enhance alert context with service knowledge, ownership, and observability data
In addition to too many alerts, responders often don’t have access to important context around an issue. This lack of visibility can cause confusion about the scope or severity of the issue, as well as how to remediate it and who is meant to do so.
You can configure various processors to enrich and normalize your events as Datadog ingests them. For example, you can use processors to normalize tagging across your events, or create new tags based on event content. This enables you to easily query and filter events more easily. Enrichment processors, such as lookups, automatically enriches your ingested events and alerts with business-specific data—such as ownership, location, etc.—from your configuration management database (CMDB) or operational spreadsheet. This additional context enables all responders, regardless of their experience with the systems in question, to know where to look for the problem, how to remediate, and who to contact during an incident.
Accelerate remediation with automated triage workflows
Once a responder understands the issue, Datadog provides multiple ways to automate next steps and triage processes to speed up remediation. Native integrations with hundreds of tools and technologies enables you to automate tasks, including:
- Creating tickets in your preferred IT service management (ITSM) tool such as ServiceNow and Jira with bidirectional syncing
- Triggering notifications in PagerDuty, Slack, or Microsoft Teams to bring awareness to an investigation
- Executing runbook automations and recommended next steps based on your results
- Escalating and prioritizing cases in Case Management to jumpstart your triaging with observability context for faster discovery
For example, with our ServiceNow integration you can create tickets and sync incident information to Case Management for the correct context, regardless of the tool you use.
Integrate AIOps into your monitoring workflows
The complexity of modern IT environments makes it increasingly difficult for teams to sift through the amount of data they generate efficiently. AIOps has the ability to transform observability data into actionable insights, empowering teams to anticipate, understand, and resolve issues before they impact customers. But the ability of AI-powered tools to accurately detect and understand problems is only as good as the data those tools have access to. As a unified observability and security platform, Datadog constantly ingests, processes, and enriches data from your whole tech stack. Having access to this rich set of data sources enables Datadog’s AIOps capabilities to surface insights that are relevant and actionable for customers.
For example, Watchdog, Datadog’s platform-level AI, detects anomalies and outliers throughout your environment and helps you discover root causes. Together with Event Management, Datadog AIOps makes it easy for central response teams to proactively identify underlying causes, reduce noise with intelligent event correlation, and accelerate investigation and remediation.
Event Management is now generally available. See our documentation to get started. Or, if you’re not already a customer, try a 14-day free trial or request a demo.