Case Study: Lithium achieves full OpenStack visibility and faster incident resolution with Datadog

How Lithium monitors OpenStack

Lithium, a social software provider powering more than 400 branded communities with its Total Community platform, runs a large OpenStack private cloud that hosts production sites, demo environments and core infrastructure like Kubernetes and Chef. With such broad reliance on OpenStack, Lithium needed reliable, correlated visibility into resource usage and health to prevent outages, control runaway development instances, and enable accurate capacity and quota planning.

Lithium adopted Datadog to collect OpenStack, RabbitMQ and MySQL metrics, track key signals (instances, instances per project, available RAM and vCPUs, and metric deltas), and surface trends with dashboards and change graphs. Datadog’s alerting (PagerDuty, chat, email) and cross‑stack correlation replaced Horizon’s limited views, letting engineers find root causes faster, reduce downtime and wasted resources, and make better purchasing and operational decisions—saving time, money and protecting customer experience.

Lithium