Transforming Datadog & PagerDuty Workflows with GenAI: The Hawkeye Advantage

How forward-thinking SRE teams are revolutionizing incident response with Hawkeye

Every minute counts in incident response. Yet studies show that SRE teams spend an average of 23 minutes just gathering context before they can begin meaningful problem-solving. For a team handling dozens of incidents per week, this translates to hundreds of hours spent just collecting data—time that could be spent on strategic improvements and innovation.

This reality persists despite having powerful tools like Datadog and PagerDuty at our disposal. These platforms excel at their core functions—Datadog providing deep observability and PagerDuty ensuring the right people are notified at the right time. Yet teams still struggle with response times and engineer burnout. The challenge isn’t with the tools themselves—it’s with how we use them. Adding to this challenge, most organizations have multiple observability tools, meaning engineers rarely have all the information they need in one place when that PagerDuty alert comes through.

The Current Landscape: Powerful Tools, Fragmented Response

Today’s incident management stack is more sophisticated than ever. PagerDuty orchestrates complex on-call schedules and escalation policies, while Datadog provides deep visibility into system behavior through real-time monitoring and alerting. Together, they form a powerful foundation for incident response.

Yet the reality in most enterprises is far more complex. Different teams often prefer different tools, leading to scenarios where application metrics might live in Datadog, while infrastructure logs reside in CloudWatch. When an alert fires, on-call engineers must navigate this fragmented landscape, often while half-awake and under pressure to resolve issues quickly.

Enter Hawkeye: Your Integration-Savvy GenAI Teammate

Consider a different approach. Instead of humans serving as the integration layer between tools, Hawkeye acts as an intelligent orchestrator that not only bridges Datadog and PagerDuty but can pull relevant information from your entire observability ecosystem. This isn’t about replacing any of your existing tools—it’s about having a GenAI powered SRE that maximizes their collective value and helps your team deliver results and scale.

Beyond Simple Integration

When a PagerDuty alert fires, Hawkeye springs into action before any human is notified. It automatically gathers context from across your observability stack, analyzing the situation and preparing a comprehensive response plan. This means that when an engineer does need to get involved, they’re not starting from zero—they’re starting with a complete understanding of the situation and clear next steps.

This multi-tool correlation happens in seconds, not the minutes or hours it would take a human engineer to manually gather and analyze data from each platform. More importantly, Hawkeye learns the relationships between different data sources, understanding which tools typically provide the most relevant information for specific types of incidents.

The Transformed Workflow

The transformation in daily operations is profound. Traditional workflows require engineers to wake up, log into multiple systems, gather context, and formulate a response plan—all while under the pressure of a live incident. Each context switch introduces delays and opportunities for oversight.

With Hawkeye, engineers instead start with a unified view of the issue and all the information needed to resolve it in one coherent root cause analysis. Routine issues are easily resolved by implementing the recommended actions, while complex problems come with detailed investigation summaries that already include relevant data from across your observability stack. This shifts the engineer’s role from data gatherer to strategic problem solver.

The Future of SRE Work: From Survival to Strategic Impact

The transformation Hawkeye brings to SRE teams extends far beyond technical efficiency. In today’s competitive landscape, where experienced SRE talent is both scarce and expensive, organizations face mounting pressure to maintain reliability while controlling costs. The traditional response—hiring more engineers—isn’t just expensive; it’s often not even possible given the limited talent pool.

Hawkeye fundamentally changes this equation. By automating routine investigations and providing intelligent analysis across your observability stack, it effectively multiplies the capacity of your existing team. This means you can handle growing system complexity without proportionally growing headcount. More importantly, it transforms the SRE role itself, addressing many of the factors that drive burnout and turnover:

• Engineers spend more time on intellectually engaging work like architectural improvements and capacity planning, rather than repetitive investigations. 
• The dreaded 3 AM wake-up calls become increasingly rare as Hawkeye handles routine issues autonomously (*roadmap, today it recommends an action plan). 
• New team members come up to speed faster, learning from Hawkeye’s accumulated knowledge base, and cross-training becomes easier as Hawkeye provides consistent, comprehensive investigation summaries.

For organizations, this translates directly to the bottom line through reduced recruitment costs, higher retention rates, and the ability to scale operations without scaling headcount. More subtly, it creates a virtuous cycle where happier, more engaged engineers deliver better systems, leading to fewer incidents and more time for innovation.

Getting Started

Implementing Hawkeye alongside your existing tools is a straightforward process that begins paying dividends immediately. While this blog focuses on Datadog and PagerDuty, Hawkeye’s flexible integration capabilities mean you can connect it to your entire observability stack, creating a unified intelligence layer across all your tools.

Take the Next Step

Ready to transform your fragmented toolchain into a unified, intelligent operations platform? Contact us to see how Hawkeye can become your team’s AI-powered SRE teammate and help your organization move from reactive to proactive operations.