Online fashion and lifestyle platform The Iconic has unified its observability with Datadog to eliminate blind spots in performance monitoring and ensure a faster, more reliable shopping experience for customers across Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).
Founded in Sydney over 14 years ago, and now part of Global Fashion Group (GFG), The Iconic now has over 2 million active customers, the platform offers a curated assortment of over 200,000 products from 1,500 local and international brands.
As demand for the platform grew, The Iconic’s engineering teams recognised the need to consolidate observability to deliver end-to-end visibility, faster issue identification and consistently strong performance, particularly during peak trading periods.
“Before Datadog, visibility was split across multiple platforms, which made troubleshooting slower and more complex,” said Andrew Burton, head of platforms at The Iconic.
“For any online retailer, performance during peak periods like the Black Friday and Christmas seasons can make or break the customer experience,” said Burton. “By consolidating observability, our engineers can detect issues faster, understand their impact, and keep the platform running smoothly when demand surges.”
Built on AWS with a growing microservices architecture, The Iconic now uses Datadog to monitor logs, traces, and metrics across its entire stack.
Datadog’s AI/ML capabilities automatically detect anomalies after deployments, Service Level Objectives (SLOs) track reliability trends over time, and clear service ownership ensures the right team is alerted the moment performance dips.
“Datadog’s AI capabilities help us surface regressions without developers babysitting dashboards, SLOs give us a longer-term view we can take back to the organisation, and clear team ownership means the right people get notified at the right time,” Burton said.
By consolidating observability, The Iconic has also streamlined its engineering operations. Integrations with tools such as GitHub centralise data previously spread across niche systems, giving both technical and business stakeholders a single source of truth.
The result is faster incident resolution and greater confidence heading into major sales events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday when traffic can spike significantly, sometimes up to 10 times above normal levels. For example in 2025, over the Black Friday weekend alone, The Iconic sold a total of 63, 408 units, averaging two items a second.
“Observability is how our teams meet their ownership responsibilities,” Burton added. “Datadog makes it easier for developers to instrument services correctly, see issues early, and find root causes quickly. That supports what the organisation cares about, reliable performance and a smooth customer experience.”
Looking ahead, The Iconic plans to deepen its use of SLOs, improve the developer experience for on-call and alerting, and experiment with Datadog’s security capabilities. The organisation is also exploring new features, such as external service monitoring, as its platform and partner ecosystem evolve.
“Fashion e-commerce lives or dies on speed and reliability, especially during major sales events. If a customer can’t check out, that’s lost money,” said Roz Gregory, regional VP for ANZ at Datadog.
