Case Study: CDK Global achieves full visibility into Java applications in Docker with Sysdig

CDK Global - Customer Case Study

CDK Global’s Digital Marketing business unit, which supports data analytics for thousands of dealers, moved to a containerized CoreOS/Docker infrastructure across two environments and two data centers using large hosts (24‑core, 256 GB RAM). Their stack is Java‑heavy (ETL, REST APIs, Nginx front ends) and operated by 10 DevOps teams; existing monitoring (Nagios, Java Melody, Graphite with 100,000+ stats but only weeks of retention) could not easily see inside containers or collect JMX metrics without image changes or sidecar workarounds.

They adopted Sysdig, a drop‑in agent that captures hundreds of system‑call‑based metrics and surfaces host→container→JVM→JMX→application visibility without modifying container images. Sysdig’s native use of Docker labels, unified dashboards, long retention and fast exploration let teams self-serve monitoring, speed troubleshooting (for example correlating OOM events to performance drops), and integrate monitoring into their next‑generation PaaS strategy.

CDK Global

Branden Makana

Senior EAngineer