The need for cloud migration and unified monitoring

Tmap Mobility is the world’s first mobile navigation service and has established itself as an industry leader over the past 20 years by providing the fastest and safest routes across South Korea. In 2020, the company spun off from SK Telecom, one of South Korea’s largest telecommunications conglomerates, to operate as an independent full-mobility platform. Today, it delivers navigation, taxi, public transit, parking, designated driver, and EV charging through a single application, with ambitions to become the go-to app for every form of mobility.

Supporting that growth demanded a more flexible and scalable infrastructure. At the time of the spinoff, Tmap Mobility relied on an on-premises environment inherited from SK Telecom. This environment limited the company’s ability to deploy new services quickly and respond to changing demand. At the same time, rising infrastructure costs—including expiring data center contracts, pending hardware reinvestment, and increasing software licensing fees—created additional pressure to modernize.

The business case for a full cloud migration was clear. But migrating more than 3,000 instances to the cloud while simultaneously operating large-scale consumer services introduced operational risk—making monitoring not just important, but mission-critical.

The company’s existing monitoring approach further constrained operations. Development and DevOps teams relied on separate tools and analyzed logs independently, creating visibility gaps that slowed incident response and made it difficult to maintain consistent service performance.

To address these challenges, Tmap Mobility pursued two strategic initiatives: fully migrating to the cloud and standardizing on a unified observability platform. Executing this migration without disrupting live services required strong operational control. Providing teams with shared, real-time visibility into system performance was critical to reducing risk and ensuring a stable migration. Datadog was selected to provide that consistency across teams and environments.

Centralizing observability and gaining operational alignment

With Datadog in place, Tmap Mobility replaced its fragmented monitoring setup with a centralized observability platform, giving development and DevOps teams a single source of truth. Using Infrastructure Monitoring, engineers gained real-time visibility into the health and performance of their cloud environment—critical during their migration as they moved approximately 3,000 instances from on-premises to the cloud. Log Management unified the log environments that had previously slowed root cause analysis, while APM gave developers end-to-end visibility into application performance across Tmap Mobility’s growing suite of services.

With all teams now working from the same data in the same environment, incident response became faster and more coordinated. When issues arise, automated workflows create Jira tickets and notify the relevant teams via Slack. That shared visibility has also improved post-incident analysis: because everyone is looking at the same data, teams can more easily identify what went wrong, what worked, and where the response process can be refined.

The next phase: improving cost efficiency

With the cloud migration complete, infrastructure costs became the next top business priority. Unlike hardware investments that depreciated quietly over time, cloud spend is billed monthly as a direct reflection of how efficiently resources are used. This shift to transparent, usage-based billing put new pressure on teams to control costs. As the environment continued to grow, engineering teams were expected to optimize not just for performance, but for cost as well.

In response to this shift, Tmap Mobility made cost optimization a company-wide KPI, aligning development, business, and DevOps teams around shared financial accountability. Engineering teams focus on improving infrastructure efficiency, while business teams identified and phased out underperforming services.

“Tmap Mobility plans to use Datadog not just as an observability tool, but as a comprehensive development platform encompassing information security and AIOps.”

Datadog Cloud Cost Management (CCM) played a central role by making cost data visible within existing engineering workflows. By analyzing cost alongside performance, teams could make faster, more informed decisions. As Tmap Mobility’s platform grew—with monthly log ingestion doubling from 30 billion to 60 billion records—Datadog helped keep monitoring costs in check, with the overall cost ratio decreasing over the same period.

The road ahead: scaling securely with AI and data

Looking ahead, Tmap Mobility is extending its platform strategy to include security and AI-driven innovation. It is building a DevSecOps model that integrates security directly into development workflows, helping reduce risk while maintaining development speed. The team is also evaluating solutions such as Workload Protection and Cloud SIEM to strengthen its security posture as its cloud environment continues to grow.

At the same time, Tmap Mobility is investing in AI to enhance user experience and support new use cases. It recently launched a mobility AI agent that enables users to interact with the platform through LLM-based voice conversations. The service provides personalized recommendations, route guidance, and real-time information, creating a more intuitive and responsive experience.

To support these innovations, the company is expanding its observability capabilities and exploring AIOps to further automate operations. “Tmap Mobility plans to use Datadog not just as an observability tool, but as a comprehensive development platform encompassing information security and AIOps,” says Kim Jae-Soon, CTO at Tmap Mobility.

Over time, Tmap Mobility aims to connect infrastructure, application, and business data to better understand the cost and performance of each service. By linking cloud spend directly to user activity, it can make more informed investment decisions and continue evolving into a fully data-driven mobility platform.