How ArisGlobal Improved Life Sciences App Reliability with Datadog

ArisGlobal builds LifeSphere—an interoperable platform across Safety, Regulatory, Quality, and Medical Affairs—to help pharmaceutical and biotech companies manage drug safety monitoring and regulatory compliance. The company's Site Reliability Engineering team, a small but critical group, is primarily tasked with ensuring availability and meeting Service Level Objectives for LifeSphere. As demand for the platform grew, the team recognized their existing observability tool lacked the capabilities needed to right-size environments and maintain high availability standards.

ArisGlobal selected Datadog to address its observability and operational challenges. Through codespan tagging, engineers use APM to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues on a user-by-user basis, providing granular visibility into application behavior across key infrastructure environments. "Being able to see the time taken for individual requests and being able to give that information back to the development team has been invaluable," notes Rajkamal Madhaiyan, Site Reliability Engineer at ArisGlobal.

ArisGlobal also implemented Datadog's Automation suite—Workflow Automation, App Builder, and Datastore—to optimize operations and simplify remediation. When incidents occur, the team is notified through Datadog On-Call and the event is automatically recorded in Incident Management. Workflow Automation buttons embedded directly into dashboards allow SREs to restart or remediate services during incidents, triggering standardized runbooks without switching tools. App Builder creates self-service interfaces for deployment operations with strict access controls. Datastore persists service states for clean restarts and powers SLO reporting dashboards.

The shift to Datadog also delivered significant cost savings. Previously, ArisGlobal invested in a separate automation platform that took nearly a year to set up and struggled with adoption. By consolidating automation within Datadog, the team eliminated standalone licensing costs while dramatically improving usage. The results are measurable: diagnostic file collection that previously took 45–60 minutes now happens near-instantly, and 100% of previously manual operational tasks are now automated.