Case Study: iHeartRadio achieves container-level Docker visibility and faster service troubleshooting with Datadog

How iHeartRadio monitors Docker performance

iHeartRadio, the streaming music and digital radio platform with over 75 million registered users and availability across more than 60 devices and platforms, moved from a monolithic app to many small, siloed services running in Docker to handle scale and dependency isolation. That shift solved development and resource-allocation problems but created an operational challenge: traditional monitoring only showed host-level metrics, leaving iHeartRadio blind to container-level resource use and unable to aggregate metrics by service image for troubleshooting.

iHeartRadio adopted Datadog’s Agent to collect per-container CPU, memory, I/O and network metrics and to tag and aggregate those metrics by image or other tags. Datadog breaks down network traffic by container/image, enables change-based alerting (reducing alert fatigue), and correlates Docker and non-Docker services like HAProxy, MongoDB and Elasticsearch—giving engineers immediate visibility into overloaded services and faster incident investigation across hosts.

iHeart Radio