Uber Freight, a division of Uber, is on a mission to advance supply chains and move the world’s goods more efficiently. To do so, Uber Freight uses an industry-leading combination of technology, capacity, and partnership to help shippers and carriers of all sizes run as intelligently as possible.
With more than 1,000 shippers and $18B freight under management, Uber Freight must provide a 99.99 percent uptime for its customers. To accomplish that, Thiyagarajan Anandan, product management leader for site observability engineering and DevOps at Uber Freight, needed end-to-end observability for all Uber Freight services. Unfortunately, the company’s existing tool came up short and often did not detect incidents before end users reported problems. The company also couldn’t fully expand its monitoring capabilities across their entire system, creating monitoring coverage gaps. Finally, the existing tool’s user-based licensing policy restricted access to specific users.
To achieve end-to-end observability, Anandan turned to Datadog. His team now uses Datadog to collect metrics, create dashboards, perform end-to-end monitoring, and configure alerts. With Datadog, Uber Freight now benefits from systems-reported incidents, comprehensive metrics, and immediate alerts. “Datadog gives us end-to-end observability,” says Anandan. “We can capture any degradation in the quality of services before a customer even realizes it.”
Using Datadog, observability is no longer limited to specific users, which has helped decrease MTTR/MTTD significantly and deliver an improved customer experience. “Datadog helps reduce MTTR because we don’t have to struggle with a limited set of engineers anymore,” says Anandan. “Everybody can look into issues and contribute back. That’s very important to us because if our shipper platform is down for any amount of time, it could delay critical processes like getting goods to a grocery store.”
In addition to improving its overall observability, Anandan says Datadog onboarding and adoption was a great experience because of the support Datadog provided. “We went from pilot to production in 40 days,” he says. “Before, that would have taken three months. That was only possible because of the stellar support and partnership from the Datadog team.”
Ultimately, Datadog is helping Uber Freight gain the end-to-end visibility it needs to move the world’s goods quickly and efficiently.