Cloud monitoring and security platform Datadog has solved the age-old joke: “What’s up, dog?”
At Datadog, the answer is not, “Not that many, right?” Rather, the company launched a web dashboard that shows developers the status of dozens of services and tools, including AWS, Cloudflare, OpenAI, and Slack. This allows developers to check whether major software providers are working properly. The tool is free, so anyone can check Updog to see if the major SaaS providers are up and running.
Datadog is clearly having fun with this branding. Of course. “Datadog has an uptime monitoring product, so you’re telling me they didn’t call it ‘updog’?” software engineer Reese Sullivan said in a June X post.
Four months later, Datadog engineer Tim Brown responded, “Here you go,” linking to the newly released Updog.
Sullivan’s original tweet was actually referring to the branding of tools within the paid Datadog platform that offer more in-depth monitoring tools, while the free Updog is aimed at more general use. Anyone can check the status of popular online services without requiring a Datadog subscription.
All kidding aside, Updog looks like it will be a useful free tool for developers. And it probably would have come in handy on Monday. That’s when AWS experienced a day-long outage that took much of the web offline, including some banks, payment processors, and government services.
Datadog says its Updog dashboard is distinguished by its use of AI to identify subtle patterns in telemetry (the remote transmission and collection of data from servers and services), allowing potential outages to surface faster. If Updog can pull this off, its foresight could transform companies that rely on SaaS tools for everything from collecting payments to accessing data stored in the cloud.
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“Updog.ai recently revealed an Amazon DynamoDB degradation 32 minutes before AWS updated its own status page,” Datadog wrote in a blog post.
While businesses can’t always avoid major breakdowns like this week’s AWS outage, catching a service issue early can at least give businesses extra time to assess their situation, and that’s what Updog does.
