ParkMobile, a provider of smart parking and mobility solutions in the U.S., has utilized Datadog for monitoring, APM, and logging during its migration from an on-premises data center to a cloud-based environment on Amazon Web Services (AWS). ParkMobile relied on Datadog throughout its migration journey and continues to use Datadog for observability into metrics, traces, and logs.
ParkMobile helps millions of people easily find and pay for parking on their mobile devices, with solutions to quickly pay for street and garage parking without having to use a meter or kiosk. Additionally, ParkMobile offers parking reservations for concerts, sporting events, airports, campuses, and more, in cities across the United States.
When ParkMobile began the process of migrating their legacy on-prem infrastructure to AWS, their engineering team needed a new approach to monitoring, logging, and APM that could manage the transition at both scale and cost, and support cloud-native services and design patterns.
“In 2018, we made a strategic decision to fully migrate to AWS and sunset our data center. As we migrated our applications to containerized workloads on AWS, we quickly realized our legacy monitoring tools weren’t ready for this new Kubernetes and EKS based world,” said Matt Ball, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at ParkMobile. “The team tried a few different tools, including open-source, but the costs in both financial and human terms were too high. Our Site Reliability Engineers were turning into full-time open-source engineers, which was a poor use of resources. Datadog is intuitive and cost-effective, and it has allowed us to index all our logs, see them alongside our metrics, and trace our applications with support for the languages we use. We adopted Datadog in February 2020 and we were fully out of the data center by June. Datadog really accelerated our migration.”
Kubernetes Clusters
Once ParkMobile had migrated their IT infrastructure and applications, they needed to implement new monitoring and alerting frameworks to reflect the dynamic nature of their new cloud environment. Datadog provided observability into these new microservice architectures and Kubernetes clusters, as well as powerful alerting tools and robust integrations, allowing ParkMobile to adopt and build with these new technologies with confidence.
“Datadog helped us utilize Site Reliability Engineering concepts, allowing us to implement meaningful SLIs and SLOs,” added Mr. Ball. “With easy integrations into Slack and Opsgenie, Datadog worked seamlessly with our paging, ITIL, and incident management process as well. It didn’t take too many people or too much time to implement Datadog. We now have ten times the observability as before at less than half the cost. It just worked.”
“For digital businesses migrating to cloud workloads, Datadog not only provides the necessary observability, but also saves time, money, and precious engineering resources,” said Alex Rosemblat, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Datadog. “We’re glad that ParkMobile has realized these benefits throughout their migration process and look forward to helping more customers in the future.”
