Case Study: CircleCI achieves unified observability and faster incident detection with Datadog

Prevent Future Technical Issues by Centralizing Alerts, Events, and Metrics

CircleCI, the hosted continuous integration and deployment platform, was struggling as its infrastructure rapidly scaled: a patchwork of monitoring tools forced engineers to spend hours manually correlating logs and metrics, historical data was only retained for two weeks, and the team even missed an outage that should have been caught earlier.

By adopting Datadog, CircleCI consolidated alerts, events, and metrics into a single, integrated dashboard, replaced Nagios for alerting (pushing alerts into PagerDuty), and gained quick visualizations and longer-term historical analysis. The change delivered fast time-to-value, reduced mean time to detect by surfacing spikes and patterns (fixing slow API calls and other hidden issues before customers were impacted), and eliminated the manual work of stitching together multiple monitoring systems.

CircleCI

David Lowe

Backend Developer, CircleCI