Switching from DataDog to InetSoft for a Business Intelligence Tool

The first major driver of the switch was the gap between technical monitoring and business insight. DataDog was outstanding at telling the company whether systems were healthy, but it was less suited to answering questions like: Which clients are most profitable? Which document types cause the most rework? How do turnaround times vary by site, shift, or client segment? These questions required blending operational data with financials, staffing, and contract terms. InetSoft, as a business intelligence and visual analytics platform, was designed to connect these dots and present them in dashboards that business leaders could actually use.

Another key factor was data modeling and transformation. The company’s data lived in multiple systems: a production scanning platform, a ticketing system, a time-tracking tool, a CRM, and an accounting system. With DataDog, the focus was on ingesting metrics and logs, not on building a semantic layer that business users could understand. InetSoft offered a robust data transformation layer that allowed the analytics team to join, cleanse, and reshape data into business-friendly models. They could define concepts like “job,” “batch,” “client SLA,” and “rework rate” once, then reuse them across dashboards and reports.

This semantic layer became crucial for standardizing KPIs. Previously, different teams calculated metrics in different ways—operations might define “on-time completion” differently than finance or sales. With InetSoft, the company created a governed set of metrics: turnaround time, error rate, rework percentage, revenue per batch, and cost per page. These definitions were embedded in the platform, so every dashboard and report pulled from the same logic. This reduced confusion, shortened meetings, and allowed leadership to focus on decisions instead of debating numbers.

Visualization and storytelling were also significantly improved. DataDog’s dashboards were powerful for engineers, but they were not ideal for executives, account managers, or operations leaders who needed a narrative view of performance. InetSoft allowed the company to design layered dashboards: high-level scorecards for executives, operational views for site managers, and detailed drill-downs for analysts. For example, an executive could see overall SLA compliance across all clients, then drill into a specific client, then into a particular site or document type that was driving delays.

Client-Facing Reporting

The company also needed better support for client-facing reporting. Many of their customers—hospitals, law firms, and government agencies—required regular performance reports showing volumes processed, turnaround times, and error rates. With DataDog, generating these reports meant exporting data and manually building slide decks or spreadsheets. InetSoft’s embedded analytics capabilities allowed the company to create secure, branded portals where clients could log in and view their own dashboards. This not only reduced manual reporting work but also strengthened the company’s value proposition as a transparent, data-driven partner.

Cost structure and value alignment played a role as well. As the company expanded its use of DataDog beyond core infrastructure monitoring, licensing and usage costs grew. Yet many of the business stakeholders still felt underserved because the tool was not optimized for their needs. By shifting business intelligence workloads to InetSoft, the company could keep DataDog focused on what it does best—observability—while using InetSoft for cross-functional analytics and reporting. This division of labor made spending more rational and aligned each tool with its strengths.

The migration process required careful planning and change management. The analytics team began by cataloging the metrics and dashboards that business users relied on, regardless of whether they came from DataDog, spreadsheets, or ad hoc SQL queries. They then designed a new data model in InetSoft, connecting to the company’s databases, cloud storage, and line-of-business applications. Rather than simply replicating old views, they used the opportunity to streamline and improve: consolidating redundant reports, clarifying metric definitions, and designing dashboards around specific decisions and workflows.

Training was essential to adoption. Many managers were used to static reports or basic monitoring dashboards and were initially skeptical of yet another tool. The analytics team created role-based training sessions and starter dashboards tailored to operations, finance, sales, and client services. They emphasized practical use cases: identifying bottlenecks in scanning, tracking SLA risk in real time, and spotting clients whose volumes were trending up or down. As users saw how InetSoft could answer their questions in a few clicks, resistance faded and curiosity grew.

One of the most impactful outcomes was improved operational control. With InetSoft, site managers could monitor throughput by shift, machine, and operator, and correlate that with error rates and rework. They could see when a particular scanner was consistently underperforming or when a specific document type caused indexing delays. This allowed them to adjust staffing, retrain employees, or reconfigure workflows before issues escalated into missed SLAs or client complaints. The same data also fed into continuous improvement initiatives, helping the company refine standard operating procedures.

Strategic Impact

From a strategic perspective, the switch to InetSoft elevated analytics from a reactive, IT-centric function to a core business capability. DataDog remained a critical tool for keeping systems healthy, but InetSoft became the lens through which leadership viewed the business. Quarterly reviews, pricing decisions, capacity planning, and even sales pitches began to rely on InetSoft dashboards and reports. The company could demonstrate, with data, how it met or exceeded SLAs, where it was investing in efficiency, and how clients were benefiting from process improvements.

In the end, the move from DataDog to InetSoft for business intelligence was not about replacing one tool with another, but about recognizing that observability and business analytics serve different purposes. For a document management and records digitization service company, both are essential. DataDog keeps the technical backbone reliable; InetSoft turns the flood of operational and financial data into insight, narrative, and action. Together, they support a more resilient, transparent, and data-driven organization that can scale its services while maintaining the trust of highly regulated clients.

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