How Datadog's IT Team Automated Monitoring Third Party Accounts

Software companies often rely on multiple external software pieces for employees' daily tasks, leading to the need for secure account management across various platforms. Manual audits can be time-consuming and inefficient, especially as a company grows. To address this issue, Datadog developed "Clarity," an automatic tool that audits accounts in SaaS applications against Workday, their human resources information system (HRIS). Clarity flags accounts in SaaS applications that do not match active employee records in Workday and sends logs and metrics to Datadog for detailed account information. It also generates tickets in Freshservice and alerts in Slack for further investigation. The tool's requirements include a single source of truth, regular audits, manual run capability, and integration with existing tools like Slack, Freshservice, and Datadog itself. Clarity uses metrics, logs management, dashboards, notifications, and historical records to ensure seamless integration and ease of use for IT teams. The next steps involve expanding the tool to monitor account usage and optimize SaaS spend further.