Case Study: Compass achieves proactive, data-driven full-stack observability and 9× faster incident resolution with Datadog

A Proactive Approach to Data-driven Observability

Compass, founded in 2012, built a technology-driven real estate platform to simplify buying, selling, and renting, growing rapidly through organic expansion and acquisitions to support over 13,000 agents. That hypergrowth exposed a fragmented monitoring stack—multiple point tools caused constant context switching, slow user provisioning, false positives, and engineer burnout—preventing a proactive approach to detecting and resolving user-facing issues.

Compass migrated to Datadog’s unified observability platform (metrics, traces, logs, APM and Synthetic Monitoring), using the web recorder and APIs to quickly scale tests and correlate frontend checks with backend data in a single pane of glass. The change enabled automated routing of alerts, repeatable monitoring practices, and faster triage—reducing mean time to resolution for high-severity incidents from 2 hours 26 minutes to 16 minutes, increasing coverage of the tech stack by 60%, and improving frontend performance and SEO for property listings.

Compass

Chris Seltzer

Engineering Manager