Nancy Zhu
Brianne Bujnowski
For on-call engineers responding to alerts, every minute counts. Faster incident response means faster mitigation, reduced downtime, and better customer experience. But even the most finely tuned, meticulously detailed alerts can leave responders scrambling for more information. In order to effectively triage and investigate incidents and set remediation in motion, responders need data to help them contextualize alerts. Yet, in practice, they often have no way of getting the context they need right where they're alerted. Instead, they must pivot to devices that aren't readily at hand, pass authentication, and navigate to their telemetry sources—all of which costs precious time.
The Datadog mobile app can help teams kick-start their incident response from anywhere, at any time, providing responders on-the-go access to on-call schedules, dashboards, logs, traces, and Datadog Incident Management. In this post, we'll show you how you can use the Datadog mobile app to optimize your incident response and minimize your mean time to repair.
Get instantly actionable alerts—any place, any time
The Datadog mobile app can help you ensure that you receive critical push notifications based on their urgency levels. High-urgency pages from the app can override your phone's silent mode and "Do Not Disturb" settings, while lower-urgency pages can be delivered quietly to reduce alert fatigue. You can also set reminder notifications before your scheduled on-call shifts to ensure that you're prepared.
All of your alerts are collected in the mobile app's Notification Center feed, which you can use to track which alerts you've received, which ones have been acknowledged, and what's still waiting on you.
Within the mobile app, you can inspect any alerting monitors and pivot from there to any relevant Datadog dashboards, logs, traces, and Notebooks. This centralized visibility enables teams to triage issues and kick-start their investigations faster than they can reach for their laptops and log in. You can also use Bits AI SRE to scan your alerting monitors, identify root causes, and outline potential next steps: Bits AI automatically investigates alerts so you can quickly see the bigger picture and get a head start on your incident response.
These tools can help you get your investigation rolling as soon as you receive an alert, make quick work of triage, and accelerate your root cause analysis. Let's say it's 3 a.m. and performance degradation in a critical service triggers one of your monitors. The Datadog mobile app overrides the "Do Not Disturb" setting on your phone, and you instantly receive the page.
You open the app and immediately get detailed information on the impacted service, the triggering monitor, and key telemetry, so you can quickly assess whether the alert requires action or can wait. If the issue isn't critical, you can acknowledge the alert, mute the monitor, and get back to sleep. If there's an issue that warrants escalation, you can declare an incident, notify your team, and investigate the issue without so much as reaching for your laptop.
When you're ready to dive deeper, you can easily hand off from mobile to desktop, which allows you to pick up from wherever you left off.
Keep teams in sync at scale and on the go
Reducing your mean time to repair requires effective coordination across teams. The Datadog mobile app helps ensure that responders stay aligned, informed, and ready to act, no matter where they are. The app provides visibility into your team's on-call schedules, rotations, and escalation policies, so you can:
- Quickly identify who's on call for a given team or service
- Check the rotation schedule in order to facilitate smooth handoffs and plan ahead for your next shifts
- Understand team ownership of services and monitors to avoid delays in routing alerts
By keeping everyone aware of who's responsible and available, you can avoid confusion and minimize the time teams spend getting in sync during critical moments. As noted above, you can also set reminder notifications ahead of your on-call shifts to stay prepared.
In order to help you more seamlessly monitor your services, the Datadog mobile app supports real-time home and lock screen widgets that surface key information so you can stay aware of potential issues without needing to open the app.
The app supports widgets for active incidents, on-call rotations, active pages, monitors, SLOs, and timeseries and query values from dashboards. By providing this information at a glance, the Datadog mobile app helps reduce friction for responders monitoring ongoing incidents or watching for signs of emerging problems, enabling situational awareness and accelerated response. Together, these features help teams coordinate more effectively, stay prepared, and act quickly—key factors in expediting your incident response.
Act faster on incidents
The Datadog mobile app can help enhance operational agility and speed up incident response by enabling responders to stay informed and take action from anywhere, at any time. You can learn more about the Datadog mobile app, which is available for iOS and Android, throughout our blog. If you're new to Datadog, sign up for a 14-day free trial.
