Visibility into email health and performance is indispensable to any organization seeking to reach its customers through their inboxes. As they work to curtail spam, internet service providers (ISPs) are redefining the standards of deliverability on an ongoing basis, and organizations often struggle to adapt. Meanwhile, oversaturation leads many users to pass over much of what does reach their inboxes, which can foil efforts to reach customers, and not only in the short term: Low open rates are among the many factors that can damage your sending reputation and compromise long-term deliverability. When deliverability is compromised, all kinds of important communications can fail to reach customers—from marketing and transactional emails to time-sensitive alerts.
Datadog provides a growing suite of integrations for monitoring email health and performance. These integrations offer visibility that can help your organization navigate the complexities of deliverability, measure engagement, and troubleshoot with precision when emails fall short of their targets.
In this post we’ll show you how you can use Datadog’s integrations for Mailgun, SendGrid, and Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) to quickly analyze your organization’s email health. We’ll also cover how you can gain additional visibility through these integrations by using Datadog Log Management to enrich your email performance data.
Quickly analyze your organization’s email health
Many organizations use third-party services to ensure deliverability and understand how their customers are engaging with their emails. Mailgun, SendGrid, and Amazon SES each offer a range of resources for managing email at scale, from deliverability and engagement analytics to mailing list management.
With Datadog’s integrations for these services, you can collect important metrics and logs and monitor email performance alongside your other observability data. Each of these integrations provides essential visibility into email deliverability and engagement.
Deliverability metrics
With deliverability metrics, you can track how often your emails successfully reach your customers and (in conjunction with logs) identify and troubleshoot issues that may tie back to your sending reputation. Each of these integrations allows you to analyze deliverability with metrics for sent, successfully delivered, and bounced emails. Mailgun and SendGrid provide metrics for both bounced and dropped emails: Bounces occur when delivery attempts are rejected by the receiving servers, while drops occur when your transport service forgoes attempting delivery owing to previous refusal of delivery by a receiving server (to prevent damage to your sending reputation).
Engagement metrics
Where deliverability metrics indicate your baseline email health, engagement metrics help you understand how your emails perform once they’ve reached recipients’ inboxes. But it’s important to remember that ISPs track recipients’ engagement with your email, too, which can have a major impact on deliverability.
The engagement metrics provided by these integrations include the rate at which recipients open your successfully delivered emails and the links within them, as well as the rates at which they unsubscribe from your lists or mark your messages as spam.
Alongside deliverability and engagement metrics, the logs collected from these integrations can provide even deeper and more granular visibility into your email health and performance. For example, the screenshot below shows the Log Analytics section of the out-of-the-box (OOTB) dashboard for our SendGrid integration.
With deliverability and engagement metrics provided alongside the SendGrid log stream and analytics in a single view, you can both jump-start your troubleshooting and quickly grasp trends in deliverability and engagement.
You can reference our documentation for a complete breakdown of the data collected by our SES, Mailgun, and SendGrid integrations. Next, we’ll explore how Datadog can help you build on this data with enriched visibility into your email performance.
Get enriched visibility into your organization’s email performance
Whether your organization uses SES, Mailgun, SendGrid, or all of the above, Datadog Log Management can help you build a seamless and richly detailed picture of your email performance. With Log Management, you can build on the telemetry you collect from these services by standardizing and enriching your log data and using it to generate custom metrics.
For example, since different ISPs impose different deliverability rules, you might want to track email performance by domain in order to guide your troubleshooting of delivery issues. You can do so with Log Management by creating a log pipeline and applying it to your email service logs. Next, you can add a custom grok rule to extract the domain from each recipient email address.
You can then define domain as a log facet, which you can use to tag or group metrics, enabling analysis of bounce rates by domain.
But let’s say you’re using multiple email services. Getting a cohesive picture of these bounce rates—or any email performance metric—could be complicated by discrepancies between the logs for these services. For example, SendGrid logs label bounce events Bounced and have a type of Blocked, whereas Mailgun labels them Failed, with a reason of Suppress-Bounce. Log Management makes it easy to resolve this type of disparity by remapping log attributes. In this case, you could map the Bounced and Blocked event types to the same value (e.g., @evt.name:bounced) in order to easily measure bounces across services.
Standardizing and enriching your email log data can help you generate metrics from these logs in order to augment those offered by your email services. For example, let’s say you want to track your email delivery times, which can vary widely based on sending reputation. (A less-than-perfect sending reputation may cause soft bounces—in other words, temporary refusal of delivery—of your organization’s emails.) In response to soft bounces, transport services may place emails back in their message queues and periodically retry delivery. These services will generally space out attempts to minimize potential damage to your sending reputation, which can be impacted by failed deliveries. Let’s say you’re using SendGrid, which will periodically retry delivery for up to 72 hours before dropping emails. You could track delivery latencies by extracting timestamp values from SendGrid logs with an @evt.name value of deferred and generating a distribution metric from these values.
Or perhaps you’re using more than one of these services. By standardizing your tagging with log pipelines, you can easily generate high-level, cross-service metrics for email deliverability and engagement. For example, you might want to create an email_events.bounced metric to create a timeseries of all bounced emails, tagging by domain, for at-a-glance visibility into bounces.
Simplify and standardize email performance monitoring
With Datadog’s growing suite of email service integrations, you can build a comprehensive picture of your organization’s email health and performance, track engagement, and troubleshoot deliverability. To get started, check out the documentation for our SES, Mailgun, and SendGrid integrations. If you’re new to Datadog, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial.
