Case Study: Glovo achieves zero database downtime and scales its on-demand delivery app with Datadog Database Monitoring

Glovo scales on-demand delivery app and eliminates downtime with Datadog Database Monitoring

Glovo, a fast-growing on-demand delivery app operating in 25 countries, was migrating from a monolithic to a microservice architecture and saw database resource consumption outpace growth. Poor provisioning, rising query volume, and limited observability led to frequent capacity incidents and outages of up to three hours.

By extending its existing Datadog stack with Database Monitoring, Glovo gained query-level visibility, quickly identified and fixed inefficient queries (including a writer-vs-reader issue), and improved capacity planning. The fixes cut CPU usage from 65% to 60%, eliminated database downtime (3→0 hours), scaled from 1 to 90 databases while improving performance, and saved roughly $750,000, helping Glovo continue serving ~15 million users.

Glovo

Amith Reddy

Site Reliability Engineer