Australian online fashion and lifestyle retailer The Iconic taps Datadog AI powered tech
Datadog, an AI powered observability and security platform for cloud applications, reports that it is working with The Iconic with a view to eliminating blind spots in performance monitoring and ensuring a faster, more reliable shopping experience for customers across Australia and New Zealand.
Founded in Sydney over 14 years ago, and now part of Global Fashion Group (GFG), The Iconic has over two million active customers and offers a curated assortment of over 200,000 products from 1,500 local and international brands.
Its engineering teams recognised the need to consolidate observability to deliver end-to-end visibility, faster issue identification and consistently strong performance, particularly during peak trading periods.
“Before Datadog, visibility was split across multiple platforms, which made troubleshooting slower and more complex,” says Andrew Burton, Head of Platforms at The Iconic. “For any online retailer, performance during peak periods like upcoming Black Friday and Christmas seasons can make or break the customer experience. By consolidating observability, our engineers can detect issues faster, understand their impact, and keep the platform running smoothly when demand surges.”
Built on AWS with a microservices architecture, The Iconic now uses Datadog to monitor logs, traces, and metrics across its entire stack.
“Datadog’s AI capabilities help us surface regressions without developers babysitting dashboards, SLOs give us a longer-term view we can take back to the organisation, and clear team ownership means the right people get notified at the right time,” Burton says.
The retailer has also streamlined its engineering operations. Integrations with tools such as GitHub centralise data previously spread across niche systems, giving both technical and business stakeholders a single source of truth.
“Observability is how our teams meet their ownership responsibilities,” Burton adds. “Datadog makes it easier for developers to instrument services correctly, see issues early, and find root causes quickly. That supports what the organisation cares about, reliable performance and a smooth customer experience.”
The Iconic plans to deepen its use of SLOs, improve the developer experience for on call and alerting, and experiment with Datadog’s security capabilities. Itis also exploring new features, such as external service monitoring, as its platform and partner ecosystem evolve.
“Fashion e-commerce lives or dies on speed and reliability, especially during major sales events. If a customer can’t check out, that’s lost money,” says Roz Gregory, Regional Vice President for ANZ at Datadog. “The Iconic has well and truly ‘got Australia looking’ through its constant innovation and focus on customer experience, and its continued investment in the solutions and tools behind the scenes keeps the platform fast, resilient, and ready for whatever shoppers want next.”
RTIH AI in Retail Awards
Brarista, IBM Consulting, Foundit!, Quorso, Vusion, Sensei, Reckon.ai, EE, Walkbase, Globant, Riskified, and Goddiva were among the winners at the RTIH AI in Retail Awards, sponsored by VenHub Global, 3D Cloud, EdTech Innovation Hub, and Retail Technology Show.
Our 2026 hall of fame entrants were revealed during a sold out event which took place at The Barbican in Central London on Thursday, 29th January, and consisted of a drinks reception, three course meal, and awards ceremony presided over by award winning comedian, actress and writer Lucy Porter.
In his welcome speech, Scott Thompson, Founder and Editor, RTIH, said: “According to Amazon’s Andy Jassy: AI is a once in a lifetime reinvention of everything we know, and the largest technology transformation since the cloud.”
“Whether that’s overstating it or not, we're certainly seeing an increasing number of innovative, potentially game changing developments in this space across both traditional and digital retail spaces. And that is reflected in tonight's finalists, who are boosting customer experiences and tackling retailers' painpoints across the likes of physical stores, online, omnichannel, supply chain, and payments.”
“To quote one of our judges: I have to admit, judging these awards was so difficult. So many that would have been worthy winners. And great to see how AI has moved firmly into delivery mode. Firmly into delivering for customers and driving huge innovation.”
Congratulations to our 2026 winners, and a big thank you to our sponsors, judging panel, the legend that is Lucy Porter, and all those who attended our Thursday, 29th January gathering.
Stay tuned for an indepth review of the awards ceremony in the next edition of RTIH magazine.
Continue reading…