How Alpiq Consolidated 5 Monitoring Tools into One with Datadog

Alpiq produces and trades electricity across Europe, managing a portfolio that includes nuclear, hydropower, wind, and photovoltaic assets alongside complex digital integration systems that connect trading operations, power plant monitoring, and grid management. For the five-person integration team led by Amine Ajil, Head of Integrations, the reliability of those integrations is not abstract — failures can affect essential business functions including power trading and plant operations.

Before tool consolidation, the team operated more than five separate monitoring solutions. Each tool gave partial visibility into a different layer of the stack, but no single view connected them. Troubleshooting a cross-system issue required pivoting between platforms, extending resolution time and increasing cognitive overhead. Costs were higher than necessary, and the team couldn’t achieve true end-to-end observability. Simultaneously, Alpiq was executing a broader cloud migration, transitioning its integration layer from an on-premises Tibco platform to the cloud-based MuleSoft Anypoint Platform — a change that required rethinking how integration performance would be monitored.

Ajil discovered Datadog through its consolidated observability capabilities and adopted it as Alpiq’s company-wide platform. To handle the MuleSoft migration specifically, he found the Datadog Mule® Integration in the Datadog Marketplace — an offering built by IO Connect Services, a technology partner specializing in MuleSoft and AWS. The setup took a matter of hours. Using the Datadog APM connector within MuleSoft applications, API logs flow directly into Datadog’s Traces tab, giving Ajil a drag-and-drop interface for specifying what data to surface and a unified view for pivoting between APM traces and log management.

The consolidation delivered immediate gains: tool sprawl dropped from five monitoring solutions to one, and mean time to detect issues fell by 25–30%. Within a single day of setup, Ajil had configured his preferred views and was using the platform operationally. The Traces interface made it possible to identify failing APIs at a glance and drill down to the exact trace without switching contexts.

Ajil has since pushed adoption of the Datadog platform beyond the integration team to business-facing units, including trading. His view is that the platform’s accessibility makes it viable for non-technical users, which extends its value well beyond the integration and engineering functions that originally deployed it.