Culture Amp boosts platform speed & sustainability with Datadog

Culture Amp has deployed Datadog to improve both the reliability and speed of its global employee-experience platform, benefitting over 25 million employees who access feedback, surveys, and performance tools via the company's offering.

Platform improvements

Key metrics related to platform performance have shown marked progress since implementation.

The company reports that frontend responsiveness is significantly better, with Key Content Paint nearly 50% faster and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) reduced by almost 30%. These changes aim to ensure that users can interact with the system more quickly and face fewer delays, which can impact daily workflows for employees and managers alike.

Observability expansion

Culture Amp has scaled its observability practices across its engineering teams, increasing their use of Datadog's tools five-fold. The move has allowed engineers to access a unified view of the platform's health and track user issues in real time. Teams now monitor platform behaviour, manage incident response, and use analytics to focus resources on the most pressing technical challenges.

Sustainability efforts

The use of Datadog's monitoring capabilities extends to tracking progress on sustainability goals.

Culture Amp reports that it has cut its cloud-related emissions by close to 50%. This is attributed to more accurate measurement of infrastructure energy use and better benchmarking of sustainability initiatives such as CPU and database transitions. These changes support growing environmental, social, and governance (ESG) priorities set by boards and HR teams.

Data-driven decisions

The company has made particular use of Datadog SQL (DDSQL), which enables querying of live infrastructure and application data. This approach supports engineering teams in testing hypotheses, measuring the impact of technology changes before large investments are made, and benchmarking outcomes in areas like sustainability.

"You can't change what you can't measure. Datadog gave us the ability to measure the impact of our efforts without heavy instrumentation. We've now come so far that we've been able to cut our scope 3 hosting provider emissions by almost 50 per cent, which has helped us align sustainability and cost goals while improving engineering efficiency," said Artem Yakimenko, Director of Engineering, Site Reliability, Culture Amp.

AI-powered insights

Datadog's anomaly detection and AI-driven features have assisted in identifying abnormal behaviour and alerting teams to emerging issues. These tools analyse usage trends and have provided engineers with insights into potential system problems before they affect users. This aids in minimising the time users experience any technical friction.

"Datadog's anomaly detection stood out well before AI hype took off. The quality of statistical insights we get, for example, helps us get insight into different slices of data that might be less obvious and quickly get an idea about the possible causes and impact of the issue at a glance," said Yakimenko.

Compliance focus

Culture Amp is participating as a design partner for Datadog's upcoming governance product, seeking to further streamline compliance for organisations that process sensitive employee data. The company also expects to benefit from Datadog's Australian data centre, enabling compliance with regional data residency requirements.

End-user experience

Monitoring improvements are particularly relevant for HR and business leaders relying on Culture Amp for continuous feedback and performance management. These processes increasingly require real-time access, as employee engagement activities often happen outside traditional office hours.

"In employee experience, there are no off hours. Companies depend on platforms like Culture Amp to perform seamlessly every time an employee logs in, gives feedback, or tracks performance. What stands out in Culture Amp's use of Datadog is the way it has put the data to work. Whether it's querying infrastructure in real time, tracking energy efficiency, or linking errors to deployments, it's showing how observability data can drive faster, better decisions that support the day to day user experience," said Adrian Towsey, Vice President - Commercial, Datadog.