Critical Support for AWS
Monthly improvement engineering, 24x7 incident cover, AWS-native tooling and Datadog observability.
Out of hours, nobody is accountable for your AWS production, and the developers covering it are holding pagers and privileges they should not. Critical Support for AWS takes the pager and the accountability: engineers finding and fixing latent defects every month, with 24x7 incident cover beneath. Built for tech-led SMBs, it combines Datadog full-stack observability with AWS-native tooling: CloudWatch, GuardDuty, Cost Explorer and more.
Combined with Datadog across infra, APM, logs, security signals, and cost.
Operating AWS with the platform's own tools plus Datadog
We use AWS's own observability, security, and cost tools, complemented by Datadog for unified cross-service visibility.
Amazon CloudWatch
Metrics, logs, and alarms across EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, and RDS
AWS X-Ray
Distributed tracing for microservices and serverless workloads
Amazon GuardDuty
Threat detection across accounts, workloads, and S3
AWS Security Hub
Centralised security posture and compliance findings
IAM Access Analyzer
Identifies unintended access and least-privilege drift
Cost Explorer & CUR
Spend attribution, rightsizing, and savings plan analysis
Compute Optimizer
ML-driven rightsizing recommendations for EC2, ECS, Lambda
AWS Systems Manager
Operational runbooks, patch management, and session access
AWS Backup
Centralised backup policy and recovery point management
Auto Scaling & Well-Architected
Capacity planning, scaling policies, and WAF review inputs
The same flagship service, through an AWS lens
You already know what needs fixing. The IAM roles nobody has reviewed, the CloudWatch alarms nobody trusts, the runbooks that were never written, the costs nobody owns. Improvement work is the only work with no deadline attached, so it loses every week to delivery and to whatever broke this morning.
Critical Support is that work, done every month: engineers finding and fixing latent defects across reliability, security, performance, cost and governance, so your platform becomes safer to run over time. Beneath it sits 24x7 incident cover, with a contractual 15-minute response for SEV-1 and SEV-2, for the cases prevention does not catch. On AWS, that means the same flagship service with full use of the platform's native capabilities.
- EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, managed and monitored across your AWS accounts with Datadog + CloudWatch for unified visibility
- GuardDuty and Security Hub, threat signals triaged and escalated within contracted response times
- Cost Explorer and Compute Optimizer, rightsizing and savings plan recommendations in monthly improvement work
- Terraform and AWS Systems Manager, IaC and runbook automation for repeatable, auditable changes
- Well-Architected reviews, improvement engineering draws on the AWS WAF to prioritise what to fix and why
- Multi-account landing zones, we operate across hub-and-spoke account structures, Control Tower, and AWS Organizations
Part of the trust layer for AI operations. How we operate the trust layer →
AWS managed services, powered by Datadog.
Tell us about your AWS environment and we'll recommend the right Critical Support plan.