USDA Forest Service observability platform

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service manages 193 million acres of land, with the weighty responsibility of ensuring these public lands survive and thrive today and for generations to come. A core part of the Forest Service’s work revolves around tracking and responding to wildfires throughout the nation. 

When it comes to wildfire readiness and response, speed is critical to containment and survival — for plants, animals and humans. But the Forest Service saw its monitoring tools become increasingly more fragmented, siloed and unwieldy. The agency was in dire need of modernizing and streamlining observability for more than 150 critical applications and 1,000 virtual machines involved in tracking and response. 

A collaborative effort with government contractor ECCO Select led to the development and rollout of a FedRAMP-authorized full-stack observability platform that leverages Datadog and Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure. The solution uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to support legacy workloads and Amazon Elastic Container Service and AWS Fargate to adopt containers and serverless architecture.

By layering Datadog across the infrastructure and introducing real user and application performance monitoring, automated workflows and standardized deployments, the platform brought the Forest Service significant, measurable outcomes: A 60% reduction in mean time to resolution, an 85% improvement in mean time to detect backend server errors and a 75% reduction in APM deployment time. Ultimately, what these statistics really translate to is meaningful impact on land, homes and lives saved in the face of extreme danger.

Visit the Efficiency Drivers hub to learn more about the key projects changing government.

Learn more about how AWS supports innovation across federal agencies.