Every Azure incident gets an owner.
Managed services for Azure, run 24/7 from the UK.
Azure estates grow sideways: another subscription, another policy exception, another service principal nobody remembers creating. Out of hours, somebody still has to answer for all of it. Critical Cloud runs your Azure environment 24/7, owns each incident until it is resolved, and keeps the estate governed as it grows. Microsoft Partner, and the world's first Powered by Datadog accredited MSP.
Signals from all of these flow into Datadog next to Azure Monitor, so security, performance and cost are read together rather than in three portals.
What does an Azure managed service provider do?
An Azure managed service provider, or Azure MSP, takes on the day-to-day running of your Azure estate: subscriptions and policy, workloads, security findings, backups and cost, with an engineer on call when something breaks. Microsoft runs the platform. The MSP runs what you have deployed on it, under a contract that says who owns what.
Azure estates, governed from the top down
Structure, identity, workloads and security signal, run by one on-call team and read through one Datadog account.
Management groups and subscriptions
We operate across Azure landing zones and hub-and-spoke subscription structures, with Azure Policy applied through management groups so new subscriptions inherit the guardrails instead of drifting from them.
Identity stays yours
Entra ID, role assignments and access approvals remain under your control. We work within the access you grant, and material changes need your sign-off.
AKS, App Service and Functions
Containers, web apps, functions, VMs and scale sets, monitored through Azure Monitor, Application Insights and Log Analytics, with Datadog giving one view across all of them.
Defender for Cloud and Sentinel
Security findings are triaged and escalated within contracted response times, and posture work is part of the monthly engineering. Operational triage and containment, not a SOC or a forensics service.
Cost Management and reservations
Rightsizing and reservation recommendations, budgets and spend attribution, delivered as part of the monthly cost work so each team can see what it spends.
Microsoft's own frameworks
Improvement engineering draws on Azure Well-Architected and the Cloud Adoption Framework. Terraform and Azure Automation keep changes repeatable, and Azure Backup holds the recovery points.
Microsoft support vs an Azure managed service provider
Microsoft's Azure support plans connect you to Microsoft engineers when the platform misbehaves: a regional issue, a service fault, a quota, a question about how something is meant to work.
If you buy Azure through a reseller on Microsoft's CSP programme, your first line of support often comes from that reseller instead. Either way the pattern is the same: you raise a ticket, someone advises, and your team makes the change.
- Answers questions about Azure services
- Investigates faults on the Microsoft side
- Responds once you raise a ticket
- Advises, and your team makes the change
- Runs your subscriptions and workloads day to day
- Watches production 24/7 through Datadog and Azure Monitor
- Responds when your alert fires, within 15 minutes for SEV-1
- Owns response and recovery, escalates to Microsoft when the cause is in Azure, and writes the postmortem
Microsoft looks after Azure. We look after what you run on it.
Taking over from another Azure provider
Managed contracts end early and providers disappear. Production does not pause while you re-procure.
Planned transfer
We review configuration, access and governance, establish runbooks and Datadog baselines, and hold a service review in week one.
Provider already gone
The first 48 hours are stabilising steps, not full onboarding: we review access, baseline observability and put incident cover in place. The rest follows at a normal pace.
Our DPA sits inside the standard MSA, and we are ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus certified, so a replacement decision clears procurement review quickly.
Pick the level of cover for your Azure estate
Every tier includes a contractual 15-minute SEV-1 response and a Datadog account that stays yours.
Critical Support for Azure
24×7 incident management with monthly improvement engineering across all six pillars. Scales from one landing zone to multi-subscription, hybrid and combined AWS and Azure estates on the Advanced plan.
Critical Support for AzureCritical Support Lite
One Azure environment, one landing zone, no ops team of your own. Daytime or evenings and weekends cover, with 24×7 as an add-on, plus a monthly block of improvement hours.
Critical Support LiteCritical Response
Incident-only cover for Azure teams with their own day-to-day engineers. No improvement backlog: detection, triage and recovery in the window you pick.
Critical ResponseDatadog for Azure, at whatever stage you are
Azure Monitor knows a great deal about Azure. Datadog puts it next to everything else you run.
FETCH
A complimentary, guided Datadog trial on Azure. We set up the Azure integration, instrument your key services and build starter monitors and dashboards, so you judge Datadog on your own workloads.
FETCH trial enablementLaunchPad
Datadog rolled out across your subscriptions, project-managed by us from start to finish: assess, pilot, then scale. Tagging, SLOs, alerting and onboarding for your engineers are all part of it.
LaunchPad implementationHyperCare
A two-week sprint after go-live, while problems are still cheap to fix. EIP used it to roll Datadog out across 140+ services on Azure.
HyperCare post go-liveCatalyst
For Datadog on Azure that works but underdelivers. We agree a backlog covering logs, noise, cost and coverage, and our engineers deliver it.
Catalyst improvement engineeringManaged Observability
Ongoing care of your Datadog platform, also sold as Managed Datadog: monitors, tags, signal quality and spend kept in order while your team works on Azure itself.
Managed ObservabilityHealthScan
For Datadog on Azure that has been live six months or more. You get scores for coverage, signal quality, alert hygiene and cost, and a ranked backlog. If yours is newer, HyperCare or LaunchPad fits better.
HealthScan assessmentAzure platforms we operate and assess
OPX
Full-stack observability via Datadog across OPX's Azure environment, combined with monthly improvement cycles. Faster root-cause analysis through unified dashboards, and alert tuning that starts where the noise concentrates: a handful of monitors usually produce most of the alerts.
Zero
A fintech's Azure platform, benchmarked against Well-Architected using Azure Lighthouse and Datadog. The result was a roadmap ranked by impact and effort, and Zero decided what to act on.
Azure managed services: common questions
What does an Azure managed service provider do?
An Azure managed service provider, or Azure MSP, takes on the day-to-day running of your Azure estate: subscriptions and policy, workloads, security findings, backups and cost, with an engineer on call when something breaks. Microsoft runs the platform. The MSP runs what you have deployed on it, under a contract that says who owns what.
Is Microsoft support enough for Azure?
It covers the platform. Microsoft support, or your CSP reseller, investigates faults on the Azure side and answers questions about how services work. It does not watch your workloads out of hours, own your incidents or make the fix in your subscriptions. An Azure MSP does that, and handles the escalation to Microsoft when the cause sits in Azure.
Can you take over from our current Azure provider?
Yes. A planned transfer starts with a review of configuration, access and governance, with a service review in week one. If your provider has already gone, the first 48 hours are stabilising steps: an access review, an observability baseline and incident cover. Our DPA and certifications are already in place, so procurement review is quick.
How do you access our Azure subscriptions?
Through access you grant and control. Entra ID, role assignments and access approvals stay with you, material changes need your sign-off, and your team keeps full access to your own Datadog account throughout.
Do you manage AKS?
Yes. We run AKS alongside App Service, Functions, VMs and VM Scale Sets, monitored through Azure Monitor, Application Insights and Datadog together, with Defender for Cloud and Sentinel findings triaged within contracted response times.
The trust layer for AI operations runs on the same Azure operations described here. How we operate the trust layer →
Tell us about your Azure estate
How many subscriptions, what runs in them, who is on call, and whether a current provider contract is ending. We'll recommend the right service.