Case Study: Forbes achieves democratized observability, 37% faster homepage load time and 33% GKE cost reduction with Datadog

Forbes adopts Datadog to enable observability across its entire technology organization

Forbes, a 500‑employee media company that reaches millions through Forbes.com, relied heavily on Google Cloud and GKE but struggled to keep its site performant. Its previous observability solution was costly per seat, hard to set up, and siloed data so only five people could troubleshoot—making performance optimization slow and cumbersome.

After adopting Datadog and its 35+ Google Cloud integrations, Forbes expanded observability to 88 users, stood up the platform in under a day, and enabled engineers to self‑serve diagnostics. That shift drove measurable gains: a 37% reduction in homepage load time, a 33% cut in GKE costs through workload optimization (including fixes found via Continuous Profiler), and much faster onboarding and cross‑team troubleshooting.

Forbes

JD Weiner

Director of DevOps