Website monitoring in Saudi Arabia: uptime, speed, APIs and SSL certificates, with Datadog

Datadog runs its checks from two kinds of location. Managed locations are run by Datadog on the major cloud providers and show what an outside visitor experiences. A private location is a small worker you install on your own infrastructure, for example in a Riyadh data centre. It pulls tests from Datadog, runs them, and returns results over outbound HTTPS on port 443; no inbound port is opened.

Relatedobservability data residency guideDatadog Synthetic Monitoring page

Many Saudi services are an API as much as a website: a mobile app or a partner integration calls endpoints nobody looks at until they fail. An API test sends a request on a schedule and checks the answer. Datadog documents assertions on the status code, headers, response body (including JSON path checks) and response time, up to 20 per test. A multistep API test chains requests, so it can sign in, take the token and call the account endpoint the way the app does.

A browser test replays the same journey on a schedule, so it notices a broken checkout at 3 a.m. when no customer is online, and gives a stable baseline to compare releases. Real User Monitoring records what actual visitors experience on their own phones and networks, including Core Web Vitals and front-end errors, and finds what a script never meets: a slow phone model, or an error only some accounts trigger. Our Datadog Real User Monitoring page covers its set-up and privacy settings.

RelatedDatadog Real User Monitoring page

An uptime check that pages someone for every slow run is soon muted. Datadog lets a test alert only when it fails for a set number of minutes from a set number of locations, after retries, which separates a real outage from one slow network path. We usually agree three levels:

• Page the on-call engineer when sign-in, payment or a public API fails from more than one location.
• Open a ticket for slow journeys, certificate warnings and single-location failures.
• Report only for trends.

• Customer portals and e-services where sign-in must work outside working hours too.
• E-commerce and booking sites where a broken checkout is lost revenue.
• Partner and mobile-app APIs whose failure you want to hear about first.
• Internal systems staff rely on, tested from a private location.
• Third-party dependencies such as a payment gateway, checked separately so their outage is told apart from yours.

Interkey is an official Datadog partner in Saudi Arabia: we sell the Datadog licences, implement them and support them. For website monitoring that means a short, agreed list of checks:

• Uptime, browser, API and SSL tests with test accounts and masked variables for passwords and tokens.
• Private locations in your network where internal systems or in-Kingdom checks need them.
• Alert routing agreed with the teams who receive it, and a dashboard for management.
• Technical support from Riyadh, with Arabic-speaking engineers, or a documented handover.

Datadog bills synthetic checks by test runs (per 10,000 API test runs and per 1,000 browser test runs) and real user monitoring by sessions. So the bill depends less on how many checks you have than on how often they run and from how many locations: one browser test every minute from three locations is about 130,000 runs in a 30-day month; every fifteen minutes, under 9,000. SSL checks rarely need to run every minute. Datadog's quote sets the price; our Datadog pricing guide explains the units.