ROLLER deploys monitoring and security platform Datadog to boost reliability and slash cloud costs

Australian-founded ROLLER, the software powering over 2,200 attractions businesses globally including Sky Zone Trampoline Parks and Scenic World, has streamlined operations, improved reliability, and reduced cloud infrastructure costs using monitoring and security platform Datadog.  

Handling $450 million in transactions monthly across 35 countries, ROLLER relies on the system’s performance to support millions of guest experiences. With Datadog’s unified observability and security platform, ROLLER has consolidated multiple tools, broken down siloes, and gained deep visibility into system performance, allowing teams to troubleshoot faster, manage logs more effectively, and uphold critical service levels.

Sean Fernandez, CIO at ROLLER (pictured above) notes “We provide a trusted mission-critical system for attractions all over the world. It’s imperative that our systems remain highly available so our customers can continue to conduct transactions and provide a modern digital experience visitors expect. That’s how we landed on Datadog. It’s a system of intelligence that enables our small team to continue to support thousands of attractions businesses worldwide.”

Datadog has enabled ROLLER to reach its goal of 24x7 availability. Alerts worked correctly from day one of implementation, and previous pain points, such as log aggregation and correlation, have become easy to manage. The ability to correlate events across ROLLER’s entire technology stack has drastically improved incident response times. The mean time to remediation (MTTR) is down by 99%– with issues being resolved in 15 minutes when it previously could take three days.

Fernandez explained “When we have an issue, the most useful thing is not just to look at what’s broken – it’s to look at the entire stack, because you’ll always end up missing the forest for the trees with the number of events that can stem from one single issue. Datadog allows us to observe our whole environment with a single pane of glass, and the platform correlates everything in 30 seconds versus manually trawling through multiple systems, which would previously take hours at best.”

Derisking cloud modernisation and cutting costs
As ROLLER scaled, rising cloud compute costs coincided with a need to modernise its cloud infrastructure. Datadog supported ROLLER’s modernisation initiatives across infrastructure, continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD). ROLLER reduced the time to spin up new compute capacity by 77% and reduced compute costs by around 60%. Using Datadog to execute these modernisation initiatives enabled the team to improve operational efficiency while delivering long-term growth.

“Datadog derisked taking modernisation approaches on AWS,” says Fernandez. “Observability is about reducing risk. You can take a much bigger risk building infrastructure if you have a really good observability platform over the top. Datadog helped us understand whether our customers were still being serviced properly as we made changes to our infrastructure and CI/CD processes.”

ROLLER now has comprehensive visibility into its applications and infrastructure, enabling operations, engineering, security and support teams with the ability to use and communicate using one platform. ROLLER’s relatively small ICT team has also quadrupled scale while simultaneously derisking operations and supporting more complex systems.

Rob Thorne, Vice President for APJ at Datadog added “The experiences industry is defined by strong customer service, built on trust and reliability – from the moment customers book their tickets to the memories they keep. By using Datadog to create a reliable and resilient infrastructure, ROLLER has de-risked its operations while bringing down its cloud spend, priming it to support for an industry still navigating the impacts of the pandemic.”

Click here to contact Roller Software via their entry in the Australasian Leisure Management Supplier Directory.

Image. Sean Fernandez, CIO at ROLLER