Cloud monitoring and security platform Datadog solved an old joke: what is updog?
Datadog’s response isn’t “Not much, are you?” Instead, the company released 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 the big software providers are working properly. The tool is free, so anyone can check it out Updog to find out if the big SaaS providers are ready… 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 datadog has an uptime tracking product and they didn’t call it ‘updog’?”
Four months later, Datadog engineer Tim Brown replied, “there you go” and connected to the newly launched Updog.
Sullivan’s original tweet actually referred to the branding of a tool within the paid platform Datadog, which provides more in-depth monitoring tools, while 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 looks like it’s going to be a useful free tool for developers — and it probably would have come in handy on Monday, when a day-long AWS outage 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 artificial intelligence, which can spot subtle patterns in telemetry — the transmission and collection of remote data from servers and services — that can more quickly show potential outages. If Updog can pull this off, this forecast could make all the difference for businesses that depend on SaaS tools for everything from collecting payments to accessing data stored in the cloud.
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“Updog.ai recently spotted an Amazon DynamoDB downgrade 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 meltdowns like this week’s AWS outage, early notification of service issues can at least give companies extra time to assess their situation, and that’s what Updog is all about.
