Cloud monitoring and security platform Datadog has solved an age-old joke: what’s updog?
Datadog’s answer is not, “Not much, you?” Rather, the company launched a web dashboard that shows developers the status of dozens of services and tools like AWS, Cloudflare, OpenAI, and Slack — essentially letting them check whether major software providers are functioning properly. The tool is free, so anyone can check Updog to find out if major SaaS providers are up… dog.
Datadog clearly had fun with this branding, as they should. Rhys Sullivan, a software engineer, said in an X post in June, “you’re telling me that datadog has an uptime monitoring product and they didn’t call it ‘updog’?”
Four months later, Datadog engineer Tim Brown replied, “here you go,” and linked to the newly launched Updog.
Sullivan’s initial tweet was actually referring to the branding of a tool within the paid Datadog platform, which provides more in-depth monitoring tools, whereas Updog, which is free, is for more general use. Anyone can check the status of popular online services without needing a Datadog subscription.
Jokes aside, Updog seems like it will be a useful free tool for developers — and it probably would’ve come in handy on Monday, when a day-long AWS outage took a great portion of the web offline, including some banks, payment processors, and government services.
Datadog says that its Updog dashboard is set apart by its use of AI, which can identify subtle patterns in telemetry — the transmission and collection of remote data from servers and services — that can surface potential outages more quickly. If Updog can successfully pull this off, that foreknowledge can make a difference for businesses that depend on SaaS tools for everything from collecting payments to accessing cloud-stored data.
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“Updog.ai recently surfaced an Amazon DynamoDB degradation 32 minutes before AWS updated its own status page,” Datadog wrote in a blog post.
While a company may not always be able to avoid major collapses like this week’s AWS outage, knowing about service issues early can at least give companies extra time to assess their situation, and that’s what’s Updog.
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