One of the biggest challenges MSPs face is monitoring customer data usage. This can lead to expensive cost overages, so many companies are looking for ways to better understand their needs.
To help solve this issue, Datadog created a multi-organization hierarchy page about a year ago. The landing page allows MSPs to create a parent account while turning each of their customers into an individual child account that could be isolated, secured, and customized to the customer’s needs. “So they could monitor each of their customer’s environments separately from the other and be able to focus in on an issue or alert coming in from one account based on that specific individual,” Shashank Pradhan, Product Manager at Datadog, tells ChannelE2E.
“Over the past six to nine months we’ve invested in the concept of the multi-org hierarchy where we’ve added new features to get the MSPs and the partners that have these parents accounts more information around their usage and their customers’ usage,” he adds.
Expanding On The Idea
Partners began asking Datadog to see an aggregate usage across all of their customers’ usage and to see that combined at the parent account level. So in January, Datadog released a multi-org usage page was built as a result and slowly rolled it out to a few partners. Pradhan says the purpose of the page is twofold: MSPs at the parent level would like to know what the usage is across all of their customer accounts, and they need an aggregate view at the parent level. The service is now generally available to the public.
That’s because the way Datadog’s billing works is they aggregate the usage at the parent level and send out the invoice to the parent account. Whatever those aggregate numbers are, that’s what the partner is billed against, according to Pradhan. For example, the MSP could look half-way through the month and get an idea of whether the bill will be higher or lower than normal and curate their usage accordingly.
“So if they see one of their customers is using a lot more infrastructure than normal, they can go and talk to them directly or the admins to warrant that increase,” says Pradhan.
The service also shows usage trends at the parent level. That can include infrastructure use, containers, and custom metrics. This allows MSPs to view trends across the last several months and adjust their bill commitment accordingly to avoid overage costs.
In the short time since the page’s release, Pradhan says Datadog has already been receiving feedback. That means they already have plans to improve the service in the near-future. That will include expanding the duration that MSPs can view their past usage. Currently, they can view six months into the past, but the company plans to expand that. They also plan on offering more nuanced information and introduce more information surrounding admins and who controls the pages.
Coming Up
Looking to the future, Pradhan says Datadog plans to continue investing in the partner, MSP, and reseller space. “Our number one priority is to not only make Datadog work for huge terabytes of data but also a huge number of users,” he says.
He says Datadog will soon introduce an API for setting up program integrations automatically so MSPs can set up the API once instead of having to configure it one-at-a-time for each of their customers.
Datadog has added a number of new features to appeal to MSPs lately. Earlier this month, the company launched a new log-management tool and late last year they unveiled Forecasts, a tool to help MSPs predict application performance and stability issues.
Privately held Datadog also develops cloud-scale application performance monitoring (APM) and infrastructure monitoring services. The company typically competes with Cisco AppDynamics, Dynatrace, New Relic and CA Technologies, among others.
