Monitoring built around a sports body's own standards, ready to scale
A UK national sports body is getting monitoring every team can own, without retagging its Azure estate, working from a prioritised plan since the first week.
The challenge
Observability tools link metrics, traces and logs through their own tag names. Organisations that already tag their cloud carefully often find their standard and the tool's do not line up, and the joined-up view suffers. The sports body had rolled Datadog out across the Azure platforms behind its fan app and digital content, and wanted every new team to have clear ownership, alerts that reach the right people and costs it can attribute. Rather than spend its engineers' time learning how, it chose to bring in specialists early, before taking the platform to more teams.
What we did
- Ran a Datadog HealthScan and turned it into a prioritised backlog from the start.
- Designed and tested a tagging approach that works with the organisation's existing Azure standard rather than replacing it.
- Built a red, amber and green health view for stakeholders, and dashboards that filter applications and their infrastructure together.
- Set up a code-managed service catalogue with service levels, team ownership and monitors, proven first on one group of sports data services.
- Reviewed log volumes and agreed the pilot across the fan app's production services, from dashboards and monitors to cost alerting and training for each group of users.
The outcome
- A clear plan from the first week, built from the organisation's own Datadog data.
- A tagging approach that keeps its own standard intact, so it can get full value from Datadog without retagging the Azure estate.
- A platform health view stakeholders can read without digging into the detail.
- A repeatable pattern for ownership, service levels and monitors, ready to roll out across the fan app, with a clear view of which logs matter so spend goes on data teams use.
This case study is anonymised, so the customer is not named.
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