Datadog, an AI-driven observability and security platform, has become significant in THE ICONIC’s strategy to eliminate blind spots in performance monitoring. This integration seeks a faster, more dependable shopping experience for customers across Australia and New Zealand.
Founded in Sydney 14 years ago and now part of the Global Fashion Group, THE ICONIC functions as an online fashion and lifestyle retailer serving the Australian market. With over 2 million active users, the platform showcases more than 200,000 products from 1,500 brands. As demand surged, the engineering team at THE ICONIC realised that unifying observability was crucial to ensure comprehensive visibility, faster issue identification, and consistent performance, particularly during peak trading periods.
Andrew Burton, Head of Platforms at THE ICONIC, shared that the consolidation of observability with Datadog enables their engineers to detect issues swiftly, understand the implications, and maintain seamless operations, especially during high-demand seasons like Black Friday and Christmas.
The platform, built on AWS, now leverages Datadog to monitor logs, traces, and metrics throughout its stack. Datadog's AI/ML capabilities proactively identify deployments' anomalies while Service Level Objectives (SLOs) track reliability trends. This ensures immediate alerts to the right teams whenever performance drops.
Integrating observability tools like GitHub has further streamlined engineering operations, centralising data that once scattered across niche systems. This consolidation provides a single source for stakeholders, leading to expedited incident resolution and enhanced confidence during major sale events. For instance, in 2025, THE ICONIC sold 63,408 units over the Black Friday weekend, averaging two items per second.
Looking to the future, THE ICONIC plans to delve deeper into using SLOs, enhancing developer experiences, and exploring Datadog’s security features. The addition of external service monitoring reflects the evolving platform and partner ecosystem.
Roz Gregory, Regional Vice President for ANZ at Datadog, remarked on the importance of speed and reliability in fashion e-commerce. She praised THE ICONIC’s dedication to customer experience, emphasising how Datadog's solutions contribute to the retailer’s fast, resilient platform, ready to cater to ever-evolving shopper needs.
