Datadog, a cloud monitoring and security service, has put a new spin on an old joke: What’s up, dog?
Instead of the classic reply, Datadog introduced a web dashboard that enables developers to view the operational status of numerous services and platforms such as AWS, Cloudflare, OpenAI, and Slack. This allows users to quickly determine if major software providers are experiencing issues. The dashboard, called Updog, is available at no cost, so anyone can use it to check the health of leading SaaS platforms.
Datadog clearly embraced the playful branding. In June, software engineer Rhys Sullivan joked on X, “you’re telling me that datadog has an uptime monitoring product and they didn’t call it ‘updog’?”
Four months later, Datadog’s Tim Brown responded, “Here you go,” sharing a link to the freshly released Updog.
Sullivan’s original post was actually about the branding of a feature within Datadog’s paid suite, which offers advanced monitoring capabilities. In contrast, Updog is a complimentary tool designed for broader, general use, letting anyone check the status of popular online platforms without needing a Datadog account.
Joking aside, Updog appears to be a valuable free resource for developers. It likely would have been especially useful on Monday, when an extended AWS outage disrupted much of the internet, affecting banks, payment systems, and government websites.
According to Datadog, Updog stands out because it leverages AI to detect subtle trends in telemetry data—information collected and transmitted from remote servers and services—which helps identify potential outages sooner. If Updog can deliver on this promise, early warnings could be crucial for businesses that rely on SaaS products for tasks like payment processing or accessing cloud data.
“Updog.ai recently detected an Amazon DynamoDB slowdown 32 minutes before AWS posted an update on its own status page,” Datadog shared in a blog post.
Even if companies can’t always prevent widespread disruptions like the recent AWS incident, having advance notice of service problems can give them valuable time to respond—and that’s the idea behind Updog.
