Culture Amp, an employee experience and performance platform, is using the Datadog platform to strengthen reliability, improve incident response, and accelerate its sustainability initiatives.
Founded in Melbourne, Culture Amp now supports more than 25 million employees across 6,800+ organisations worldwide, including Canva, On, Asana, Dolby, McDonalds and Nasdaq.
The company turned to Datadog to establish a single mechanism to monitor its distributed, cloud-native systems, and gain the insights needed to support its growth and sustainability ambitions.
Artem Yakimenko, director of engineering, site reliability, at Culture Amp, said Datadog’s breadth of capabilities was key to scaling observability across the organisation.
“Datadog provides comprehensive observability strategies alongside an extensive suite of monitoring capabilities in a single package. APM, logging, testing, and infrastructure monitoring all work together without the need to stitch multiple vendor solutions together,” said Yakimenko.
Culture Amp initially adopted Datadog to provide a holistic observability strategy and platform that could be applied across the entire organisation. One of the early wins came when the platform helped engineers dive deep into frontend performance and improve KCP (Key Content Paint) by almost half and LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) by almost a third, drastically improving the ‘snappiness’ of the UI for end users.
Since then, Culture Amp’s use of Datadog has expanded five-fold, with teams now relying on the platform for monitoring and application performance analysis.
Yakimenko said Datadog SQL (DDSQL) has been especially valuable, describing it as “something completely unique in the industry.”
The feature, which allows Culture Amp to query infrastructure and application data which Datadog is monitoring using traditional SQL queries, has enabled Culture Amp to query live infrastructure and application data, test hypotheses before committing engineering resources, and benchmark sustainability efforts such as ARM adoption and Graviton-backed databases.
“Datadog gave us the ability to measure the impact of our efforts without heavy instrumentation,” Yakimenko said. “We’ve now come so far that we’ve been able to cut our scope three hosting provider emissions by almost 50%, which has helped us align sustainability and cost goals while improving engineering efficiency.”
Beyond performance and sustainability, Datadog’s AI/ML capabilities, which helps identify and highlight abnormal behaviour against account trends, seasonal day-of-week, and time-of-day patterns, has also been a differentiator for Culture Amp.
Culture Amp is now working with Datadog as a design partner for its governance product, aimed at streamlining compliance processes for customers in industries handling sensitive employee data.
The organisation also expects Datadog’s new Australian data centre presence to strengthen its ability to meet data residency requirements.
“In employee experience, there are no off hours. Companies depend on platforms like Culture Amp to perform seamlessly every time an employee logs in, gives feedback, or tracks performance,” said Adrian Towsey, VP-Commercial at Datadog.
“What stands out in Culture Amp’s use of Datadog is the way it has put the data to work,” said Towsey. “Whether it’s querying infrastructure in real time, tracking energy efficiency, or linking errors to deployments, it’s showing how observability data can drive faster, better decisions that support the day to day user experience.”
