How Datadog and Sentry Software's Stars Aligned in 2022

OpenTelemetry, Sustainability, and Datadog Marketplace; you could say that these 3 concepts sound totally unrelated. But they ran into each other this year for Sentry Software and Datadog. Here's the story.

A little bit of history

Since 2004, Sentry Software has specialized in hardware monitoring. Our main product is an agent that detects and reports hardware failures in servers, network devices, and storage systems regardless of the vendor. It stands out as it supports more than 100 systems, including HP, Cisco, Lenovo, Huawei, NetApp, Pure, Dell, EMC, etc. Our solution has proven successful as proprietary software for years. It has been deployed in hundreds of organizations to monitor almost 2 million systems worldwide!

20 years of experience in hardware monitoring

A new era has begun

But recently, something big happened: we leveraged our hardware monitoring expertise to measure sustainability indicators on every server, network device, and storage system. Our solution can now help data centers' admins implement and maintain sustainability strategies, in pure software! In other words, a significant shift for our organization!

It is difficult to ignore that climate change is real and happening now. It's all over the news, and we see the consequences in our everyday life! Anything we can do to limit our carbon emissions must be done now. Don't think 2050, it'll be too late by then. So, at Sentry Software, we thought: “we have a great piece of tech here, but it works only in a proprietary - and pretty old - monitoring framework. If we want to save the world (or at least be part of the solutions), we need to open up!” So, we looked at OpenTelemetry.

A new world was ahead of us, and we didn't want to walk that path alone. So, we looked for well-established partners, and our choice fell first on Datadog.

Why the choice of Datadog made sense?

First, the platform itself is excellent. It fully supports OpenTelemetry. Its metrics, alerting, and dashboarding features are fantastic, and that was a vital prerequisite for us.

Then, the Datadog Partner Network (DPN) is easy to use, well structured, and, most importantly, it is supported by a strong team of dedicated people. When you work with DPN, you feel like there's a workforce pushing for success. The experience as a partner is great! Also, you're provided with help and resources in your marketing and sales efforts.

And it gets even better for technology partners like Sentry Software with the Marketplace! Most platforms have a sort of market place these days, but few have the quality and structure of the Datadog Marketplace.

Let's talk Datadog Marketplace!

First, let's say the documentation and instructions are great! There's one page explaining it all, step by step, how to create your integration, your app, in the Marketplace. You'll be ready to work on your Marketplace integration in minutes! At Sentry Software, we started with literally zero knowledge or experience of Datadog. However, we still managed to get through the go-to-market process in no time.

We also liked the well-designed structure and the flexibility of the Marketplace. It is simply a Git repository, with a subdirectory for each listed app. Mainly you specify how you would like your integration to be published with JSON and Markdown. You can use your favorite development environment, which makes your life easier while working on this.

The structure lets you specify everything about your integration: the metrics it may collect, the dashboards and monitors that are packaged with it, description, documentation, screenshots, etc. You can also specify pricing: how users will be charged for using your app (per server, per user, per metric, or flat price). Datadog customers become your customers with a simple click of a button. Datadog will charge the users for the subscription to your app and repay you the corresponding fees.

The Datadog Marketplace really allows you to tailor your offering as you see fit

The Datadog team was highly helpful through the whole process. We received comments and suggestions from technical experts, marketing, tech writers, etc. They all made sure we met the highest level of quality.

More than a partnership…. a success story!

This is how planets aligned for us and Datadog this past year. We moved from proprietary to OpenTelemetry, added sustainability metrics to our solution, and created dashboards to show relevant metrics to Hardware Sentry users.

The team really made Datadog stand out compared to other vendors

Datadog, its Partner Network and its Marketplace, helped us market our product and make it available to their customers worldwide.

Visit Datadog's Marketplace Watch Hardware Sentry Dashboards Live