Life360

From Weeks to Days: How Real-Time Observability Transformed Infrastructure Velocity

How Life360 replaced legacy monitoring with full-stack Datadog observability, accelerating deployments and enabling confident, data-driven infrastructure decisions.

Observability
80%
faster deployment validation
65%
reduction in MTTR

Life360 connects over 90 million families, pets, and valuables through advanced location-tracking technology. Committed to digital safety, the company coordinates emergency response efforts—dispatching ambulances every 8-10 minutes after detected accidents to protect users during critical moments.

When reliability is literally life-or-death, infrastructure changes carry enormous stakes.

The Challenge

Legacy Monitoring Couldn't Keep Pace with the Platform

Life360's infrastructure had grown significantly, but its monitoring capabilities hadn't kept up. Legacy tools provided surface-level metrics without the depth needed to understand complex system behavior. When issues arose, teams spent valuable time hunting for root causes rather than resolving problems.

The lack of visibility created a cascading set of challenges. Deployment validation happened in sprint-based cycles—meaning teams waited days or weeks to confirm changes worked correctly. Without real-time correlation between infrastructure updates and application behavior, every deployment carried uncertainty. And with complex interdependencies between APIs and shared services, a problem in one area could impact the entire platform before anyone knew what happened.

For a company dispatching emergency services in real-time, this level of uncertainty was untenable. Life360 needed observability that matched the criticality of its mission.

The Approach

Building a Single Pane of Glass

EverOps partnered with Life360 to implement Datadog as a comprehensive observability platform—replacing fragmented legacy tools with unified, full-stack visibility. The goal wasn't just better monitoring; it was fundamentally changing how the infrastructure team made decisions.

The implementation focused on connecting previously siloed data sources into coherent views that told a complete story. Rather than checking multiple dashboards and correlating timestamps manually, engineers would see infrastructure and application behavior in a single context. This required thoughtful instrumentation, custom dashboard design, and alerting logic tuned to Life360's specific operational patterns.

Throughout the engagement, EverOps worked embedded with Life360's team—configuring agents, building dashboards, and establishing the practices that would make observability sustainable long-term.

Technologies & Tools: Datadog · APM · Distributed Tracing · Custom Dashboards · Real-Time Alerting

Technologies & Tools:

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The Approach

Embedded Expertise with a Clear Roadmap

EverOps embedded a 3-person FinOps Pod directly into Life360's platform team. Within the first week, our engineers had access to their AWS accounts, joined their Slack channels, and began a comprehensive cost analysis using our proprietary Opportunity Finder methodology.

The engagement followed a structured approach: two weeks of discovery and prioritization, four weeks of execution on high-impact optimizations, and two weeks of governance implementation to sustain savings. Throughout, the Pod operated as an extension of the internal team — attending standups, collaborating in real-time, and transferring knowledge continuously.

Unlike consultants who deliver reports, our Pod executed the changes directly — rightsizing instances, eliminating waste, renegotiating reserved capacity, and implementing automated cost controls.

The Solution

Full-Stack Observability, Continuous Feedback

EverOps implemented Datadog's complete observability suite, transforming Life360's ability to understand, operate, and evolve its infrastructure.

Key Initiatives:

  • APM & Distributed Tracing — Deployed application performance monitoring with full distributed tracing, enabling real-time tracking of requests across services. Teams could now correlate infrastructure changes with application behavior instantly, catching performance regressions before they impacted users.
  • Unified Custom Dashboards — Designed and built dashboards that combined infrastructure metrics and application telemetry in single views. Engineers stopped context-switching between tools and started seeing the complete picture of system health.
  • Proactive Alerting System — Configured intelligent alerting based on Life360's operational patterns, enabling issue detection and resolution before user impact. Alert fatigue was minimized through careful threshold tuning and actionable notification design.
  • Continuous Feedback Loops — Replaced sprint-based validation with real-time deployment insights. Teams could now validate changes in hours rather than waiting for end-of-sprint reviews, dramatically compressing feedback cycles.
The Results

Visibility That Changed How Teams Work

The observability transformation delivered immediate operational improvements. Tasks that previously took weeks to validate were completed in single-day efforts. Mean time to resolution dropped significantly as teams could pinpoint issues instantly rather than hunting through logs and dashboards.

More fundamentally, the implementation changed how Life360's infrastructure team approached their work. Decisions that once required guesswork or extensive testing cycles could now be made with real-time data. Deployments that felt risky became routine. The team moved from reactive firefighting to proactive optimization.

System reliability improved through early issue detection, and confidence in infrastructure changes increased across the organization. Engineers could move faster precisely because they could see more clearly.

80%
faster deployment validation
65%
reduction in MTTR
200+
services instrumented with APM and distributed tracing
8+
legacy tools consolidated
Client Experience

"Observability used to be something only SREs cared about. Now deployments that used to feel risky are routine. EverOps didn't just implement Datadog, they changed how our engineering org thinks about visibility and reliability."

Director of Engineering, Life360
CLIENT EXPERIENCE

"Observability used to be something only SREs cared about. Now deployments that used to feel risky are routine. EverOps didn't just implement Datadog, they changed how our engineering org thinks about visibility and reliability."

— Director of Engineering, Life360
What's Next?
With comprehensive observability in place, Life360 has a foundation that supports continued platform evolution. The visibility and feedback loops established during this engagement enable the team to tackle future infrastructure initiatives—whether scaling to serve more families, improving response times, or adopting new technologies—with confidence and speed.
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