84.51° is a retail data science, insights, and media company that helps The Kroger Co., consumer packaged goods companies, agencies, publishers and affiliates create more personalized and valuable experiences for shoppers across the path to purchase. One of the many ways they do this is by developing self-service data science and analytics software to deliver insights to clients using first-party retail data from 62 million U.S. households.
To ensure 84.51°’s data science and analytics tools are highly available and performant at scale, Nick Travis, director of DevOps at 84.51°, is focused on helping technical teams—development, support, systems, and product—work together faster across infrastructure, applications, databases, and services.
The company previously used several tools to monitor its technology stack but found it difficult to quickly and comprehensively monitor system health and lacked a shared language across teams. “One of my goals is to empower our developers to own their systems from end-to-end,” says Travis.
Alongside Datadog’s Infrastructure Monitoring, Application Performance Monitoring, and Log Management products, Travis’ team used Azure monitoring capabilities to understand the health and performance of their Azure infrastructure, applications, and services in one view across hundreds of resource groups and subscriptions. This full visibility coupled with Datadog’s AI capabilities for monitoring and alerting enabled all teams to set up consistent alerting and quickly troubleshoot issues. These capabilities allowed other teams at 84.51° to own their systems from end-to-end. “Recently, developers reported that there was an issue with their Kubernetes deployment. They started looking at Datadog by default rather than coming to us for that first question,” says Travis. “They were able to identify and address the issue themselves.”
Travis’ team has also implemented Datadog Synthetics and Real User Monitoring to enable customer-centric testing. “Datadog Synthetics and Real User Monitoring allowed us to mirror critical workflows, both manually through the synthetics and then automatically through real user monitoring,” he says. “We were able to see the key metrics that you might want in a front end app correlated back to its APIs.”
As customers of the DevSecOps bundle for Datadog’s Infrastructure Monitoring and Application Performance Monitoring products, 84.51°’s product and development teams now have full security visibility across infrastructure, applications, and network. “It was really nice to be able to have the security information,” says Travis. “Issues that come up such as CVEs are in the same pane of glass as people’s performance data. They were able to look at that and resolve it more quickly than having to go to another tool.”
Ultimately, using Datadog allows development and product teams at 84.51° to collaborate more effectively and troubleshoot the performance of their self-serve software solutions more quickly. This has positioned 84.51° to keep up with growing demand for its data science and analytics tools while continuing to bring new innovation to the market.
