Build & Operate
New platform or product
Design and provision using Terraform and best-practice landing zones, implement Datadog monitoring foundations, then transition directly into 24×7 Critical Support at go-live.
24×7 Cloud Managed Service, Powered by Datadog
Critical Support
24×7 incident management + improvement engineering.
Critical Support is our flagship managed service for tech-led SMBs on AWS and Azure. We own incident response 24×7 and deliver monthly improvement engineering across six pillars, so your platform becomes more reliable, secure, and cost-controlled over time, not just maintained.
15 min
SEV-1 & SEV-2 response time
24×7×365
Always-on coverage
AWS + Azure
Clouds supported
Powered by Datadog
World's first accredited MSP
Two services in one
Incident Management
24×7 detection → triage → response → escalation → recovery & review. 15-min response time for SEV-1 & SEV-2.
Improvement Engineering
16–56 hrs/month across reliability, security, cost, performance, automation & governance. Monthly reporting.
Three plans: Core · Standard · Advanced, each priced on scope. Talk to us for pricing.
Improvement Engineering
Six improvement pillars, delivered every month
Critical Support isn't just incident cover. Every month our engineers work through an agreed improvement backlog across six pillars, so the platform gets better, not just maintained.
01
Reliability & Resilience
Failover design, redundancy improvements, early issue detection, and SLO/SLA management to reduce the frequency and impact of incidents.
02
Security & Compliance
Access control reviews, vulnerability management, threat detection operationalisation, and alignment to ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials Plus.
03
Cost Optimisation & FinOps
Rightsizing, waste elimination, reserved instance and savings plan recommendations, and cost attribution to give teams financial ownership.
04
Performance & Scalability
Latency diagnosis, scaling policy improvements, database query optimisation, and capacity planning ahead of growth or traffic events.
05
Automation & Efficiency
Runbooks as code, IaC improvements, auto-remediation, and reducing the manual operational burden so engineers focus on what matters.
06
Governance & Observability
Tagging standards, Datadog dashboard quality, alerting hygiene, reporting cadence, and governance guardrails that scale with your platform.
Incident Management
Five-stage incident lifecycle
Every incident follows the same structured process, from first signal to blameless postmortem.
Stage 01
Monitoring
Datadog telemetry, alerting, and noise reduction keep signal quality high. Synthetic monitors and anomaly detection catch issues before customers report them.
Stage 02
Triage
Severity classification (SEV-1–4), blast-radius assessment, and ownership assignment. Bits AI SRE assists our engineers, humans confirm before acting.
Stage 03
Response
Runbooks, safe workarounds, and rollback procedures executed by on-call engineers. Customer notified within the contracted response window.
Stage 04
Escalation
On-call routing, cloud-provider escalation, vendor coordination, and customer communication, all tracked in Datadog Incident Management.
Stage 05
Recovery & Review
Fix or rollback with validation, blameless RCA, and improvement actions fed back into the monthly engineering backlog. 60-minute recovery is a target for SEV-1.
Plans
Three plans, Core, Standard, Advanced
All plans include 24×7 SEV-1 and SEV-2 incident management with a 15-minute response time and a 60-minute recovery target. Plans differ by platform complexity and monthly improvement engineering hours. Talk to us for pricing.
| Feature | Core | Standard | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|
| Coverage | 24×7 SEV-1 & SEV-2 | 24×7 SEV-1 & SEV-2 | 24×7 SEV-1 & SEV-2 |
| Response time | 15 min | 15 min | 15 min |
| Recovery target (SEV-1) | 60 min target | 60 min target | 60 min target |
| Improvement hours/month | 16 hrs | 32 hrs | 56 hrs |
| Cloud scope | Single cloud, 1 landing zone (hub + 1–2 spokes) | Single cloud, multiple landing zones / accounts | AWS and/or Azure, 5+ landing zones / hybrid |
| Improvement pillars covered | Reliability, security & cost | All six pillars | All six pillars, cross-cloud |
| Governance cadence | Monthly reporting | Fortnightly reporting | Weekly review + quarterly strategy |
| Runbooks & RCA | Core runbooks, standard reviews | Advanced playbooks, full RCA + automation | Custom cross-cloud workflows, postmortems |
Recovery time is a target, not a contractual guarantee. Response time (15 min for SEV-1 & SEV-2) is the contractual commitment.
SLAs & response
What we commit to, precisely
Response time is a firm contractual commitment. Recovery time is a target, because recovery depends on the nature of the incident, not just our speed.
- 15-minute response time for SEV-1 and SEV-2 incidents; this is the contractual commitment. Time to first engineer contact, 24×7×365.
- 60-minute recovery target for SEV-1; this is a target. We work as fast as technically possible; complex incidents take longer by nature.
- SEV-1: complete outage or material risk to business. SEV-2: significant degradation or partial outage. SEV-3/4: limited impact, handled in-hours.
- Blameless postmortem for all SEV-1 incidents. Findings feed the improvement backlog.
- Incidents covered: service outages, performance degradation, security alerts (operational triage and containment, not SOC/MDR/forensics), integration/API failures, cloud provider incidents affecting your environment.
- Customer retains: IAM and admin control, access approvals, and all business and release decisions. Material changes need customer sign-off.
- AI is advisory: Bits AI SRE and Watchdog assist diagnosis, humans approve all production, security, and cost changes.
What a good cloud partner looks like
Five principles we hold ourselves to
Transparency
You keep access to your Datadog environment, your data, and your dashboards at all times. Nothing is hidden in a proprietary layer.
Ownership
When an incident fires, we own it to resolution, not to the first opportunity to hand it back. Accountability is the baseline.
Collaboration
Shared backlog, shared visibility. You see what we're working on and why. Service reviews are conversations, not status reports.
Integration
Improvement work is tied to reliability, security, and cost outcomes, not abstract platform activity. Everything maps to a business metric.
Enablement
Runbooks, standards, and knowledge stay in your environment after every engagement. You should be less dependent on us over time, not more.
Shared responsibility
You own your apps and decisions. We operate and improve. Hyperscalers provide the platform.
| Area | Customer | Critical Cloud | Cloud provider |
|---|---|---|---|
| Application code & data | Owns and controls | Supports, does not access data | N/A |
| Infrastructure provisioning (Terraform/IaC) | Approves changes | Implements and improves | N/A |
| Monitoring & observability (Datadog) | Has full access always | Builds, manages, optimises | N/A |
| Security, compliance & access control | Owns decisions & approvals | Operates controls, improves posture | Platform primitives |
| Incident management | Informed, approves resolution | Detects, triages, responds, recovers | Provider incident support |
| Global infrastructure & physical security | N/A | N/A | Owns and guarantees |
Getting started
Three pathways into Critical Support
Whichever path you take, the outcome is the same: 24×7 reliability, observability, and continuous improvement from day one.
Migrate & Operate
Move from on-prem or another cloud
Plan and execute migration with minimal disruption, align to landing zone standards and Datadog instrumentation, then activate 24×7 incident management and improvement engineering immediately post-migration.
MSP Transfer
Take over from an existing provider
Review configuration, access, and governance for full transparency. Establish runbooks and Datadog observability baselines. Move onto the Critical Support model with a service review in week one.
How we're different
Critical Support vs hyperscaler support plans
AWS Business/Enterprise and Azure Unified/Developer support answer questions. Critical Support owns the environment.
| Capability | Hyperscaler support | Critical Support |
|---|---|---|
| Incident response | Advisory guidance; you action | We own response and recovery |
| Proactive engineering | Not included | 16–56 hrs/month across six pillars |
| Observability platform | Native CloudWatch / Azure Monitor only | Datadog across the full stack (infra, APM, logs, security, cost) |
| Who does the work | You, with vendor advice | Our SRE team, with your oversight |
| Runbooks & automation | You build and maintain | We build, own, and improve |
| Blameless postmortems | Not standard | Included for all SEV-1 incidents |
| Cloud scope | Single provider | AWS and Azure in one service |
Powered by Datadog
Datadog is the operational backbone, not a monitoring add-on
Every Critical Support customer has direct access to their own Datadog environment, infrastructure, APM, logs, traces, security signals, cloud cost, and LLM monitoring, all configured to their AWS and/or Azure architecture. You keep full visibility. We operate it.
Traditional MSPs rely on proprietary monitoring that limits customer insight. We use Datadog, the same platform our engineers use, in your account, visible to your team at all times.
Critical Cloud is the world's first Powered by Datadog accredited MSP →
Delivered work
Case studies
OPX, Azure + Critical Support
Full-stack observability via Datadog across OPX's Azure environment, combined with monthly improvement cycles. Incident noise reduced by more than 60%, with faster root-cause analysis through unified dashboards and alert tuning.
Read case study →FAW / Hopp Studio, AWS + Critical Support
24×7 incident response plus proactive improvement for coaching systems and public websites. Tighter Datadog monitoring, quicker recovery, and improved resilience during high-traffic events.
More case studies →Service family
Need more flexibility? The full cloud service family.
Critical Support is the flagship. If you need lighter cover or incident-response-only, we have options.
Incident response only
Critical Response
Detection, response, and recovery, no proactive engineering. Plans: Daytime, Evenings & Weekends, 24×7. For teams that want cover without the full managed service commitment.
Critical Response →Start-ups & single-cloud
Critical Support Lite
Right-sized incident cover plus a smaller improvement engineering allocation. Plans: Monitor + Fix, Engineer Assist, Partner Plus. Designed to grow into Critical Support.
Critical Support Lite →FAQ
What is Critical Support?
Critical Support is Critical Cloud's flagship managed service: 24×7 incident management combined with monthly improvement engineering across six pillars (reliability, security, cost, performance, automation, governance) for AWS and Azure environments, with Datadog as the operational foundation.
What clouds do you support?
AWS and Azure. We do not currently support GCP.
What is your response time commitment?
15 minutes for SEV-1 and SEV-2 incidents; this is the contractual response time. The 60-minute recovery figure for SEV-1 is a target; recovery time depends on the nature of the incident.
What is the difference between Critical Support and Critical Support Lite?
Critical Support is the full flagship: 24×7 coverage, 15-minute SEV-1/SEV-2 response, and 16–56 hours of improvement engineering per month. Critical Support Lite is designed for start-ups and smaller single-cloud environments; lighter coverage windows and fewer improvement hours, but the same SRE-driven, Datadog-native model. Lite customers can step up to Critical Support as they grow.
Do you use AI in your operations?
Yes. Datadog's Bits AI SRE and Watchdog assist our engineers in triaging alerts and surfacing likely root causes. AI is advisory: humans approve all production, security, and cost changes.
Can I keep access to my Datadog environment?
Always. Every Critical Support customer retains direct, full-fidelity access to their own Datadog environment. Nothing is hidden in a proprietary layer. This is one of the five partner principles we hold ourselves to.
Ready to move on from reactive firefighting?
Tell us about your platform. We'll recommend the right plan and show you how Critical Support would work for your environment.