Cloud monitoring and security platform Datadog has solved an age-old joke: what’s updog? Datadog’s answer is not, “Not much, you?” Instead, the company has launched a web dashboard that shows developers the status of dozens of services and tools like AWS, Cloudflare, OpenAI, and Slack. This tool essentially lets users check whether major software providers are functioning properly. The tool is free, so anyone can check Updog to find out if major SaaS providers are up, or in their words, up dog.
Datadog clearly had fun with this branding, as they should. The idea was highlighted in a June social media post by a software engineer who expressed surprise that Datadog did not already have an uptime monitoring product named Updog. Four months later, a Datadog engineer replied to that post by sharing a link to the newly launched Updog service.
The initial social media post was actually referring to the branding of a tool within the paid Datadog platform, which provides more in-depth monitoring. In contrast, Updog is a free tool for more general use. Anyone can check the status of popular online services without needing a Datadog subscription.
Beyond the jokes, Updog seems like it will be a useful free tool for developers. It would have been particularly handy during a recent Monday when a day-long AWS outage took a great portion of the web offline, including some banks, payment processors, and government services.
Datadog states that its Updog dashboard is set apart by its use of artificial intelligence. The AI can identify subtle patterns in telemetry, which is the transmission and collection of remote data from servers and services. This capability can surface potential outages more quickly. If Updog can successfully pull this off, that early warning can make a difference for businesses that depend on SaaS tools for everything from collecting payments to accessing cloud-stored data.
In one instance, Updog identified an Amazon DynamoDB degradation 32 minutes before AWS updated its own status page. While a company may not always be able to avoid major collapses like the recent AWS outage, knowing about service issues early can at least give companies extra time to assess their situation. And that is what is Updog.