Scaling brought a whole new set of challenges

FieldEx founders developed software that allows users—including those in the construction, telecom, and financial services industries—to track equipment, manage inventory, assign jobs, schedule maintenance, and manage repairs. However, communication breakdowns, no real-time updates, and a lack of corporate transparency was creating operational bottlenecks.Through its Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), FieldEx set out to change this by giving organizations the ability to manage assets, track equipment, manage inventory, and assign tasks to field agents.

Following that success, demand quickly scaled, putting strain on existing IT systems and resources. FieldEx became an around-the-clock application, analyzing over 15 terabytes of data every week across different countries.Operating at this new scale, any downtime could cause huge disruptions to FieldEx’s customers. For chief architect and security officer Vijay Dharmaraj, this simply wasn’t an option. A modern monitoring solution was required.

After considering building its own system, the company came across Datadog’s SaaS technology and saw how efficient and seamless the transition would be. Dharmaraj was determined to maintain the system’s resilience, enable 99.9 percent availability, and ensure robust cybersecurity to instill customer confidence. “That is where Datadog fit in beautifully,” says Dharmaraj.

“It caters to both the application performance management and provides insights on security.”

Datadog’s cloud-scale monitoring platform became the backbone of FieldEx’s daily operations and allowed the company to focus on what matters most to its customers: reliability, availability, and world-class customer service.

Bringing stability and cohesion as more departments adopt tools

System stability is crucial for any digital business, and as FieldEx’s customer base rapidly scaled, the need for a smooth transition to a new digital system intensified.

With Datadog, automated issue detection and alerting has allowed developers to spend less time manually monitoring and more time focusing on business intelligence and other key strategic areas of the business.

“This stability and real-time visibility have directly improved customer trust and accelerated our go-to-market strategies.”

FieldEx rolled out Datadog on July 24, 2024, and has since seen a 30 percent improvement in operational efficiency. Mean time to detect (MTTD) took 25 minutes before Datadog and just 2 minutes after the rollout. The mean time to acknowledgement (MTTA) was reduced from 40 minutes to 10 minutes, while the mean time to resolve issues dropped from 95 minutes down to 42 minutes since Datadog’s adoption.

Dharmaraj says it was Datadog’s experience and abilities working with startups, its friendly pricing and plan flexibility, and wide range of uses across FieldEx’s functions that stood out from other platforms. “It powers the entire organization to operate and have conversations with precise quantitative data and insights,” Dharmaraj says.

The monitoring platform was initially used by FieldEx’s security teams but has since become the company’s go-to tool for the engineering and QA teams for validation and troubleshooting, and the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) provides insights on live system performance, setting the stage for the removal of system bottlenecks.

Datadog’s monitors, log explorer, and dashboards have also become favorite features of FieldEx, particularly for their flexibility and the ability to access them through a users’ preferred platform, whether it’s text, email, Slack, or the Datadog application.

Saving time and increasing efficiency

FieldEx customers span across a number of industries, including construction, manufacturing, transport, medical, and food and beverage sectors. Many of these are critical sectors, with complex operations, paperwork, and compliance.

Saving time and increasing efficiency isn’t just a bonus for FieldEx, it’s also saving time for its customers. In the construction sector, users have experienced an 81.3 percent reduction in unplanned downtime, a 72.5 percent increase in productivity and a 26.4 percent increase in revenue.

“FieldEx has become a mission-critical tool our customers turn to every single day,” said Mithran Balakrishnan, Commercial Director at FieldEx. “From instant access to historical work records and automated checklists to real-time spare parts insights and SLA alerts, we give them the intelligence to prevent delays, avoid contractual breaches, and deliver first-call resolutions. These small but vital capabilities are what enable our customers to consistently keep their promises—and win the loyalty of their own clients.”

With more time available to FieldEx’s teams, they have been able to focus on improving their product and operations and can now bring more features and benefits to customers.

FieldEx is also planning to leverage Datadog On-Call as soon as the feature is available for Malaysia and plans to begin using more of the many features within the Datadog platform.