Fama Case Study

"I'm Brenton Likstead. I'm the CTO at Fama Technologies and we are a social media background screening company.

Fama was doing a lot of cutting-edge stuff. We're in the process of rebuilding our platform from the ground up. We're releasing a new product line that's gonna run on top of that platform. We realized that the current gray logging that we had in place was not gonna fit the bill anymore. And so we decided to move into Datadog.

That was a good initiative force and a lot of respect; it posed some challenges as well. Came in at about three times what we expected it to be. We needed to find some other solution that can help us reduce those costs and hopefully give us even better visibility into what's going on in our systems.

The thing I like about Edge Delta is that it runs on the edge, and so the intelligence is running directly on the edge and you're getting alerts on anomalies much faster than you would get them from any other solution. The intelligence is built in, the ability to install it and start getting value out of it immediately without having to do anything other than install an agent is really powerful. Of course, you can configure it and you can make it more customized and more powerful. But just what you get out of the box in terms of edge intelligence. It makes it well worth the expense.

There were other options out there that allowed us to, you know, cut down the number of logs that we had or determine which place they should go, whether it's all of them to S3 and then some to Datadog or various different locations for the logs. Really, none of those provided the intelligence that Edge Delta does, especially at the edge.

The combination of Edge Delta and Datadog is sort of a match made in heaven. You don't need all of those logs. You don't need to index all of the log lines. Therefore, Edge Delta really comes into play and gives you that ability to intelligently send the things that you need to Datadog so that you have them and you can look at them when you need to look at them, but the rest just goes into your cold storage in S3 and you don't pay a lot of money for that.

We did immediately get some benefit from it just out of the box, then we installed it in our Kafka clusters and we started seeing more things. So Kafka is an ongoing challenge for us to keep maintained and running. Being able to see what is really going on in the Kafka cluster was a big benefit for us as well. We reduce the Datadog bill by about 80%, which was huge for us. It's moved back up a little bit, but that's because we're logging more and we've got more systems running and more events happening. So as business grows, obviously the amount that we're logging and the amount that we're spending on Datadog is gonna go up, but it's proportional now to where we expect it to be with the growth. It's been a big cost saving for us.

Edge Delta is better because of the intelligence that's built in, honestly. The machine learning already knows types of things that should be looking for and then it learns from your data and gets better and better at catching the things that you need it to catch. And therefore, instead of it being just a routing mechanism, it's actually learning and alerting you to things immediately that are going wrong before even routing things to the right place."