Tribute Technology delivers reliable digital services with help from Datadog and NoBS
CASE STUDY
SaaS and Service Provider
450 Employees
Waunakee Wisconsin
ABOUT TRIBUTE TECHNOLOGY
Tribute Technology powers digital funeral-service websites and applications for partner funeral homes across North America.
“NoBS and Datadog took what felt like an impossible task—migrating off New Relic in less than three months—and made it achievable. We cut costs immediately and came out with a stronger, more reliable observability platform.”
ABOUT NOBS
NoBS is a Premier Datadog Partner with 10+ years of hands-on Datadog experience. From implementation to optimization and ongoing practical support, NoBS helps organizations unlock the full potential of Datadog—fast.
WHY DATADOG
Unified coverage in one platform—Full-stack observability across AWS, Kubernetes, legacy Rackspace, and acquired environments.
Predictable, transparent pricing—No surprise overages from ingestion spikes or per-user fees.
Easy to adopt, easy to scale—A modern UI and unlimited user access made it easy for the whole team to get value fast.
WHY NOBS
Migration expertise—Guided Tribute through a complex New Relic-to-Datadog transition in under 90 days.
Tailored solutions, not templates—Built tagging, dashboards, and alerting that matched Tribute’s unique environment.
Hands-on enablement—Trained Tribute’s lean IT team to manage Datadog with confidence.
CHALLENGE
After a major acquisition, Tribute was left with fragmented observability, unpredictable New Relic costs, and low adoption across teams. With a lean IT team and a sprawl of AWS, Heroku, Kubernetes, and fragile Rackspace workloads, they needed to unify visibility, reduce waste, and improve reliability—without disrupting critical services or slowing business growth.
Use Case
Lower, predictable costs
with clear alignment to actual usage.
Full visibility across environments
by unifying AWS, Kubernetes, Rackspace, and legacy apps in one platform.
Improved uptime monitoring
with actionable alerts, clean routing, and synthetic tests.
90-day
migration
including platform setup, cleanup, and hands-on team enablement.
From Fragmented Monitoring to a Unified Source of Truth
Tribute selected Datadog for its unified observability platform and flexible cost model—and brought in NoBS to ensure a fast, low-risk migration and long-term success. In under 90 days, NoBS helped Tribute fully transition to Datadog, streamlining telemetry collection across cloud services using Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring and configuring logs via Datadog Log Management for low-cost retention using short hot storage and non-indexed defaults. The result: immediate clarity and control over both Datadog and AWS egress spend—replacing uncertainty with predictability.
“We used to feel like we were flying blind and overspending at the same time. Now we have full visibility—and we actually understand what we’re paying for and the value we’re getting. That’s a huge shift.”
- Tony Winston, VP of IT Infrastructure, Tribute Technology
Faster Fixes and Fewer Fire Drills
One of the most immediate wins was reducing alert fatigue and incident blind spots. NoBS built key Datadog Monitors, tuned thresholds, and fixed routing issues—ensuring that alerts reached the right people. They also implemented Datadog Synthetic Monitoring and SLOs to track uptime and performance across Tribute’s customer-facing websites.
For fragile Rackspace apps, they translated web logs into log-based custom metrics—delivering performance visibility without introducing risk.
“It’s not just that alerts fire now—it’s that they go to the right person and actually mean something. We don’t miss things, and we don’t get woken up for nothing.”
- Site Reliability Engineer, Tribute Technology
Visibility That Teams Actually Use
NoBS implemented standardized tagging across services, environments, app types, and team ownership—giving Tribute’s engineers the ability to pivot from symptom to system to owner in seconds. Teams received role-specific dashboards from day one, and with unlimited Datadog user access and 10+ liveenablement sessions, getting started was frictionless.
Resilient Experiences That Scale with the Business
Today, Tribute is delivering more reliable digital experiences, resolving issues faster, and operating with far greater confidence in their observability data. As the company takes on larger clients and higher-traffic workloads, their foundation for scalable, sustainable reliability is firmly in place—backed by observability spend that’s controlled, justified, and aligned to business value.
