Autodesk’s mission is to enable people in the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries to design and make anything – from everyday products to cars, buildings, bridges, games, and even movies. To accomplish that, the company provides cutting-edge software products and services. In order to maintain strong customer satisfaction, Autodesk must ensure those software products and services are fast, reliable, and highly performant.

For Morgan Goose, an engineering manager for Autodesk’s Construction Solutions division – which provides architecture, engineering, and construction software tools to help customers plan, design, construct, and operate better projects – that means providing Autodesk product engineers the observability they need to quickly identify slow or underperforming services. 

The company previously used several tools to monitor its databases, internal tools, and infrastructure but found they didn’t provide the level of detail they needed. “One of my main goals is to ensure my teams have information at their disposal to own any incidents on their services and generally have better overall insights into their tools,” says Goose.

Goose’s team recently implemented Datadog Database Monitoring (DBM) to provide deep visibility into its databases, enabling product engineers to understand the health and performance of their databases and troubleshoot issues as they arise. This came in handy recently when one of Autodesk’s customers brought a performance issue to light. “When we were digging into the database and some of the queries, we found a specific query wasn’t performing well under load,” says Goose. “Using Datadog allowed us to pinpoint where we needed to tune the query and we then connected the product team responsible for the code. Ultimately, one of our DBAs tuned the performance and improved the query, which allowed us to get ahead of any degradation in the customer experience.”

Ultimately, using Datadog allows Autodesk to better understand how to improve database performance and respond to any issues proactively so it can maintain a high level of customer satisfaction. Such insights are crucial to helping Autodesk maintain its position as a global leader in software for architects, builders, engineers, designers, manufacturers, 3D artists, and production teams.