ROLLER boosts reliability & cuts cloud costs with Datadog

ROLLER has reported significant improvements in reliability and cost control following its adoption of the monitoring and security platform Datadog.

ROLLER, based in Australia, provides software solutions for over 2,200 attractions worldwide, including brands such as Sky Zone Trampoline Parks, Scenic World, and Chipmunks Playland & Café.

Operating in 35 countries and handling more than AUD $450 million in transactions each month, ROLLER depends on its infrastructure to deliver consistent services to customers and their guests.

With a move to Datadog's unified observability and security platform, ROLLER has consolidated its operational tools, gained enhanced visibility into system performance, and fostered collaboration across its teams. The transition has enabled the company to identify and resolve issues more quickly while also supporting its service level agreements with clients.

Sean Fernandez, Chief Information Officer at ROLLER, explained the rationale behind selecting Datadog for the company's monitoring needs.

"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."

ROLLER's adoption of Datadog has led to improvements in operational uptime and the speed of incident response.

According to the company, its mean time to remediation has dropped by 99 per cent, with issues now resolved in 15 minutes as opposed to the previous three-day average. This shift has helped guarantee 24x7 system availability, a key requirement for businesses that handle booking and payment transactions across different geographies and time zones.

Fernandez elaborated on the operational impact, stating,

"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."

Datadog's capabilities have also supported ROLLER's efforts to modernise its cloud infrastructure.

As the company scaled up, increases in cloud compute costs prompted a review of its technology approach. With Datadog, ROLLER reduced the time required to deploy new computing capacity by 77 per cent and cut compute costs by approximately 60 per cent. The platform's observability features allowed the technical team to measure the impact of changes in real-time, minimising risk and improving operational efficiency during infrastructure upgrades.

Fernandez said,

"Datadog derisked taking modernisation approaches on AWS. 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."

The visibility provided by Datadog has reportedly enhanced communication and coordination among ROLLER's operations, engineering, security, and support teams, which now operate from a single data platform. The reliance on a unified system has enabled ROLLER's ICT team to support higher volumes of business and manage more complex systems without increasing operational risk.

Rob Thorne, Vice President for Asia Pacific and Japan at Datadog, commented on ROLLER's results, stating,

"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."

ROLLER's implementation of Datadog reflects a broader trend among businesses seeking to balance growth, modernisation, and cost efficiency within cloud environments. The reported operational improvements and cost savings position the company to continue meeting the demands of its international client base.