Twilio is a customer engagement platform that helps organizations build communication features to meaningfully interact with customers on the channels they prefer. Twilio consists of a set of APIs for integrating communication tools such as voice, SMS, chat, video, and email into applications.
Datadog’s Twilio integration collects a wide variety of logs to allow you to analyze performance issues and detect security threats across all of your Twilio resources. By giving you visibility into your Twilio resource consumption, performance, and potential threats, you can quickly take action.
In this post, we’ll show you how to:
- Monitor the health and performance of your Twilio resources
- Search and analyze Twilio logs for interesting trends with Log Explorer
- Detect threats to Twilio accounts in real time
- Monitor your Twilio costs to stay within budget
Get a high-level overview of your Twilio resources’ performance
Datadog’s Twilio integration collects SMS, call summary, event, and alert logs for your Twilio resources to help you analyze performance issues. You can visualize SMS logs both for outbound and inbound usage to track overall delivery performance, as well as troubleshoot individual message failures by viewing the related logs for reported errors. For example, you could use logs to discover that message deliveries are failing as a result of the destination number blocking a message, the queue overflowing as a result of too many messages in a short time span, or as a result of your message being flagged as spam by the carrier. To limit sensitive data exposure in your message logs, Datadog never collects message bodies, and the integration also gives you the ability to redact phone numbers if desired.
Similarly, Call Summary logs provide high-precision metadata gathered for every call made from your Twilio account. In many cases, knowing that a specific call had a poor user experience is not enough—you need to know precisely what variance occurred and for how long. You can monitor Twilio’s call progress events by using Datadog to help understand when a call transitioned from “ringing” to “answered” in various customizable time-series views of that data. Additionally, with alert and event logs, you can get comprehensive visibility into all changes related to your Twilio resources. The integration’s out-of-the-box dashboard provides a summary of new call logs, along with log-based metrics to help you track completed and answered calls.
Search and analyze Twilio logs easily
The integration includes an out-of-the-box log processing pipeline that enables you to process your Twilio logs and enrich them with additional context for easier searching, debugging, and analyzing. The pipeline adds alert status tags, formats IP addresses and HTTP request details, and more. This makes it easier for you to track errorful request logs and investigate further context about root causes. It also prepares your logs for parsing with Datadog Cloud SIEM. And with Flex Logs, you can easily retain Twilio logs in a cost-effective way for up to 15 months.
Twilio emits events for many different user actions, such as provisioning a phone number, changing your account’s security settings, deleting a recording, and more. These events are recorded regardless of whether an action was taken through the API, by a user in the Twilio Console, or even by a Twilio employee.
Detect and respond to security threats
Datadog Cloud SIEM enables you to track security threats in your Twilio resources by correlating Twilio event logs in real time. Cloud SIEM is built on top of Datadog Log Management to provide a shared view of threats detected in logs across developer, security, and operations teams. You can use Cloud SIEM with your Twilio logs to quickly determine if actions such as account deletion or provisioning a phone number were taken by a malicious user.
Track Your Twilio costs to improve spend allocation
Datadog Datadog Cloud Cost Management (CCM) unifies cost and observability data from across your cloud infrastructure, making it easier to track and understand cloud costs. CCM includes a SaaS cost integration for Twilio that can help you break down the various contributors to your bill. By configuring this integration, you can view SMS carrier fees, outbound voice minutes, and other key costs, and then correlate them with specific marketing campaigns or teams. This way, your engineering and finance teams can more efficiently identify inefficiencies and reallocate spend as needed.
Get full visibility into your Twilio resources
Datadog provides insight into how your Twilio resources are being managed, enables you to detect and act on potential security threats, and helps you make sure you don’t exceed your budget. The integration comes with an out-of-the-box dashboard that provides a high-level overview of key metrics like alert aggregation and message and call logs, making it easy to quickly evaluate the performance of your Twilio resources. Learn more about the integration setup in the documentation.
Datadog also has some additional integrations that work with Twilio resources. Check out this blog to learn how Datadog’s Webhooks integration allows you to automatically send SMS alerts via Twilio. Additionally, our Twillio Segment integration allows you to monitor your data infrastructure provisioned by Segment’s Sources and Destinations. Finally, our Twilio SendGrid integration allows you to collect and monitor your SendGrid email delivery and engagement metrics and logs.
Want to get started now? Log in to your Datadog environment and link your Twilio account. Or if you’re brand new to Datadog, sign up for a free trial to get started.
