Critical Support for Azure
24×7 managed operations, Azure-native tooling, Datadog observability.
Your Azure managed service contract is ending, or your provider has already gone. Production does not pause while you re-procure. Critical Support for Azure takes on that accountability: monthly improvement engineering with 24×7 incident cover beneath it, run by a UK-based SRE team. We combine Datadog's full-stack observability with Azure-native tooling: Azure Monitor, Defender for Cloud, Sentinel, Cost Management and more.
Combined with Datadog across infra, APM, logs, security signals, and cost.
Operating Azure with the platform's own tools plus Datadog
We use Microsoft's own observability, security, and cost tools, complemented by Datadog for unified cross-service visibility. The result: better signal quality and faster root-cause analysis.
Azure Monitor
Metrics, logs, and alerts across VMs, AKS, App Service, and Functions
Application Insights
APM, distributed tracing, and availability monitoring
Log Analytics
Centralised log aggregation and KQL-based investigation
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Security posture management, CSPM, and workload protection
Microsoft Sentinel
SIEM and SOAR for security signal triage and correlation
Azure Policy
Guardrails, compliance, and governance enforcement at scale
Azure Cost Management
Spend attribution, budgets, rightsizing, and reservation analysis
Azure Automation
Runbook automation, update management, and configuration
Azure Backup
Centralised backup vault and recovery point management
AKS, VM Scale Sets, App Service
Container and compute workload operations and scaling
The same 24×7 service, through an Azure lens
Critical Support for Azure is the same flagship service: monthly improvement engineering with 24×7 incident cover beneath it, applied to Azure environments with full use of the platform's native capabilities.
You already know what needs fixing: the monitors nobody trusts, the runbooks that were never written, the costs nobody owns. Improvement work has no deadline attached, so it loses every week 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 24×7 incident cover, with a contractual 15-minute response for SEV-1 and SEV-2, for the cases prevention does not catch.
- AKS, App Service, Functions, VMs, monitored and managed across your Azure subscriptions with Datadog + Azure Monitor for unified visibility
- Defender for Cloud and Sentinel, security findings triaged and escalated within contracted response times; security posture improvement included in monthly engineering
- Azure Cost Management and Reservations, rightsizing and reservation recommendations delivered as part of monthly cost optimisation work
- Terraform and Azure Automation, infrastructure as code and runbook automation, so changes are repeatable and auditable
- Azure Well-Architected and Cloud Adoption Framework, improvement engineering draws on Microsoft's architecture frameworks to prioritise what to fix and why
- Azure landing zones and Management Groups, we operate across hub-and-spoke subscription structures and Azure Policy-governed environments
OPX, full-stack Azure observability and improvement
Full-stack observability via Datadog across OPX's Azure environment, combined with monthly improvement cycles. Alert noise concentrates in any environment: a handful of monitors usually produce most of the alerts, and tuning starts there. For OPX that meant faster root-cause analysis through unified dashboards.
Part of the trust layer for AI operations. How we operate the trust layer →
Azure managed services, powered by Datadog.
Tell us about your Azure environment and we'll recommend the right Critical Support plan.