Toyota is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world. The company is on a mission to build a future where everyone has the freedom to move. Technology is critical to accomplishing that mission.

Zakir Mohammed, of Toyota Motor North America, leads a team of engineers responsible for Digital Automation Engineering. His team’s goal is to adopt new technologies that further innovation. Observability and preventing network downtime is a critical part of that process. To be successful, Mohammed’s team needs the best observability tools available for all Toyota critical business applications across thousands of nodes and on-prem, hybrid, and cloud environments. After evaluating several observability products, Mohammed’s team chose Datadog. “Datadog’s precision monitoring capabilities and AI/ML is a game changer for us,” he says.

The first benefit Mohammad’s team realized while implementing Datadog was its deployment time. “We pushed out the Datadog Agent in a matter of minutes, saving hundreds of hours of full-time employee time,” he says. Datadog also enabled his team to reduce MTTR by 80 percent.

Toyota’s Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) is one example of where Datadog has been a game changer for the company. The AGVs are critical for operations, picking up heavy car parts and materials on the assembly line and moving them from one location to another. When its AGVs were disconnecting from the network and disrupting plant operations, the AGV vendor suggested the network was the source of the issue. Mohammed’s team spent weeks troubleshooting but could not solve the problem. They then turned to Datadog and quickly discovered the issue was caused by the AGVs themselves. The vendor upgraded the AGV code, and the problem was resolved. Ultimately, Datadog allowed Toyota to solve a problem in hours that they hadn’t been able to solve in weeks, saving them thousands of dollars in lost production time.

Finally, Toyota uses Datadog’s Watchdog feature, which utilizes AI and ML on the backend to help the company forecast and prevent future outages. “Before using Watchdog, we were very reactive. Now we can be much more proactive,” adds Mohammad.

Ultimately, Datadog and AI/ML are enabling Toyota to take its business to the next level, where humans have more choices and more freedom to move from point A to point B.