From infrastructure monitoring to full observability

V Point Marketing operates V Point, one of Japan’s largest loyalty programs, with approximately 130 million members. Members earn and redeem points on everyday purchases at convenience stores, restaurants, pharmacies, and travel providers.

Built and operated entirely in-house, the V Point platform runs across both on-premises and cloud infrastructure. As the number of services grew, monitoring became increasingly siloed, leaving teams without full visibility across systems. At the same time, a deadline was approaching: the on-premises core systems were scheduled to reach end of service life in 2030. Rather than wait, V Point Marketing chose to accelerate its cloud migration plans and tackle both challenges at once.

The natural starting point was the V Point app, whose backend was already running in the cloud. At the time, the team’s monitoring was limited to infrastructure metrics like CPU and memory. These were enough to confirm that servers were running, but couldn’t reveal how the application was performing or what users were experiencing. As they prepared for migration, adding user monitoring became an equally important goal. “We set out to strengthen our observability capabilities,” says Kodai Takeda, Engineer and Tech Lead at V Point Marketing, “with a focus on earlier detection, prevention, and faster recovery.”

Centralizing a fragmented monitoring landscape

Meanwhile, cloud adoption was expanding across the organization. Different teams had independently chosen their own platforms—Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and OCI—each with its own monitoring tool. The result was a fragmented landscape where visibility stopped at the system level. “Monitoring tools differed across systems, and so did the teams responsible for managing them,” says Kazuki Harano, Cloud Architect, Platform Engineering at Culture Convenience Club Co., Ltd. (CCC), the former parent company of V Point Marketing. “Some systems were managed by internal developers, others by external vendors. When a failure touched multiple systems, identifying the root cause meant waiting on other teams, and that wait slowed everything down.”

These challenges made centralizing monitoring a clear priority. After evaluating several tools, V Point Marketing selected Datadog. The decision came down to four factors: a track record in large-scale enterprise environments, a comprehensive feature set spanning the full stack from application performance to security, a usage-based billing model suited to broad team access, and dedicated support throughout the evaluation process. “We evaluated our options for the long term and chose Datadog because it delivered everything we needed in a single platform,” says Takeda. “Given our multi-layered organizational structure, pricing based on usage rather than individual seats was exactly what we needed.”

End-to-end monitoring improves visibility

V Point Marketing rolled out Datadog across multiple systems within four months. Starting with a core group of around six department leaders, access quickly expanded to developers, operations staff, and external vendors. Within five months, the platform had approximately 60 active users.

The focus was on getting teams productive fast. The rollout started with a shared dashboard giving all teams a unified view across services. Before go-live, Datadog ran hands-on training on observability fundamentals and key platform features, so teams could start contributing on day one. “The Datadog team stayed close throughout the implementation,” says Takeda. “Their close involvement gave us confidence in the rollout.”

V Point Marketing deployed a broad set of Datadog capabilities from the start, including Infrastructure Monitoring, Log Management, APM, API Tests, Cloud Security Management, and Sensitive Data Scanner. Day-to-day usage centered on metrics and log monitoring, with approximately 20 services (nearly all member-facing cloud deployments) monitored to maintain SLOs.

APM currently covers five member-facing services: V Card Coupon, V Point Investment (a simulated investment experience), V Lottery, V Kisekae (a feature that lets users personalize their digital V Card with character and IP-themed designs), and My Page, with plans to expand coverage further. “As we grow APM coverage, we don’t need to rebuild dashboards from scratch,” says Takeda. “New services can be added quickly without additional setup.”

Consolidated observability improves incident response and team autonomy

Previously, engineers had no visibility beyond their own systems. When a problem crossed team boundaries, they had to wait on other teams to investigate. “Now our teams can monitor, analyze, and improve services independently,” says Harano. “Datadog’s intuitive interface makes it easy for anyone with a basic technical background to investigate an incident on their own. That’s raising the overall capability of the organization and building shared knowledge across teams.”

That shift has already paid off. When the team was preparing to launch V Rank, a new member benefit service, developers caught a page load issue during development and were able to trace it themselves—drilling down through the UI layer to a single overloaded SQL query. Under the old approach, that kind of cross-layer investigation would have required escalation to the infrastructure team, and the issue could have reached users before anyone noticed. With Datadog, the team resolved it independently before launch.

Looking ahead

V Point Marketing plans to bring systems currently monitored by other tools, including those running on AWS, Google Cloud, and OCI, into Datadog to consolidate observability onto a single platform. The company also intends to strengthen observability in existing environments, expanding security monitoring for AI-related workloads in R&D, exploring predictive detection, and using LLM Observability to monitor large language models integrated into backend systems.

The impact is already spreading beyond V Point Marketing. Harano notes that the CCC Group faces many of the same challenges and is now working to extend the same observability approach across other group companies. “What started as a monitoring initiative has evolved into a culture of ownership and continuous improvement,” he says, “and that mindset is now spreading across the entire CCC Group.”