Datadog: Giving Evernote unprecedented visibility for competitive cloud services

Evernote is a popular app that helps consumers and businesses increase productivity by creating digital notes from text, webpages, photos, voice memos, and even handwritten notes. These “notes” can include file attachments, giving users a handy way to capture and nurture their ideas using their favorite devices.

More than 200 million Evernote users now more securely store billions of notes and attachments—the equivalent of roughly 10 copies of every modern book ever published. As data grows, Evernote is committed to providing seamless user experiences and introducing new features and services. The company’s private cloud was no longer enough to scale to support such a dynamic infrastructure, so Evernote migrated its service to Google Cloud Platform and closed its data center, allowing employees to focus on product innovation instead of maintenance.

Uptime and performance are critical to Evernote. The company must keep its services fast and available to customers at all times. As a result, the ability to monitor every component in the application stack is vital. To better understand performance and resource utilization, Evernote chose a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform from Datadog, a Google Cloud partner. Using Datadog’s cloud service, Evernote built custom dashboards for greater visibility into its applications and infrastructure, improving performance and reducing downtime.

“Our technology strategy boils down to how fast we can empower our engineers to focus on building high- quality, innovative productivity tools,” says Garrett Plasky, Technical Operations Manager at Evernote. “By moving to Google Cloud Platform and using Datadog to improve application monitoring, we can quickly launch new services and features that will help us succeed in a changing market.”

“By taking advantage of the rich metadata available from Google Cloud Platform APIs, we’re helping companies such as Evernote vastly improve monitoring and bring data together to better understand how their applications are performing,” says Ilan Rabinovitch, Director, Product Management at Datadog.

A stronger foundation with Google Cloud Platform

Evernote moved 5 billion notes and 12 billion attachment files to Google Cloud Platform, an endeavor that was expected to take 9-12 months. Evernote used the Google Professional Services team to guide it through solution planning, architecting, and migrating 3.5PB of data in only 70 days, and with minimal customer impact. Customers benefit from the data processing power of Google Cloud Platform and are enjoying noticeable performance boosts. And because Google Cloud Platform encrypts customer data stored at rest by default, Evernote offers increased security, giving customers peace of mind that their data is safe.

Enhanced application monitoring with Datadog

By using Datadog to monitor and automatically collect key performance metrics from Google Compute Engine hosts, Google Kubernetes Engine clusters, and Google App Engine projects, Evernote has more visibility into its infrastructure and resource utilization. Engineers can correlate metrics to optimize performance and get notified of important events.

Datadog retains Evernote’s Google Cloud Platform data for 15 months at full granularity, allowing the company to compare real-time metrics against historical values. Engineers can easily slice metrics using tags to isolate certain subsets of hosts and quickly drill down for fast problem resolution.

Delivering new features faster

Rather than pouring resources into day-to-day infrastructure maintenance and monitoring, Evernote’s employees can now focus more time and energy into developing new features and responding to customer needs.

“With Google Cloud Platform and Datadog, we can move faster as a company. We’re focusing a larger portion of our engineering staff on innovation and getting new features into the hands of our customers,” adds Garrett. “We’ve already freed up two full-time employees to develop microservices to increase our feature velocity.”

Convenient integration with Google Workspace

Evernote services integrate with Google Workspace, allowing users to easily drop any file from Google Drive into their notes to add context via a handy toolbar icon and include thumbnail previews for a rich viewing experience. Any changes users make to files in Drive sync automatically with their notes.

“Evernote is where people capture and nurture ideas, and integration with Google Drive helps people cultivate and communicate those ideas with rich context,” says Erik Wrobel, Chief Product Officer at Evernote.

Capturing ideas at the speed of thought

Evernote also chose Google Cloud Platform for its built-in advanced data analytics and machine learning capabilities. In the future, Evernote plans to add voice recognition and translation features to its service using Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine, giving customers even more power to capture their ideas on the fly.

“Google’s commitments to continuing innovation, security, and partnering with companies such as Datadog for enhanced capabilities give us everything we need from a cloud provider,” says Garrett. “We’re looking forward to using Google technologies such as machine learning to increase our competitive edge and offer users even better experiences.”