With strategic curation by Delfia, the company increases the performance of the Ulife academic platform with significant gains in efficiency, usability and governance
THE Delfia curated for Ânima Educação, the largest and most innovative quality education ecosystem in the country, which adopted the Datadog observability solution a year ago to directly contribute to the operational efficiency of its virtual learning environment called Ulife, which serves thousands of students daily. The initiative brought significant gains, such as a 65% reduction in CPU usage of a critical module of the platform, a 60% improvement in response time, a 20% savings in infrastructure and a 42% reduction in contract costs. In addition, the company expanded its observability coverage by 50%, obtaining greater visibility and control in containerized environments.
After successfully using the solution to monitor its applications, improving operational efficiency and the user experience – students who access the virtual teaching platform –, Ânima Educação made a strategic shift in the management of its IT infrastructure by migrating from a recognized solution in the market to Datadog. Led by curated by Delfia in record time, the transition guaranteed the institution's security and trust in a critical period of the academic calendar, in which they capture leads — after Enem and when classes return — and marked the beginning of a new phase in the operation, which is now moving towards the use of observability data also as a tool to support the strategy and experience of users of the Ulife.
Good Datadog management in Ulife opened the doors to more refined curation and Delfia showed its closer way of working with the client, in addition to transforming the business into the most technical layer of solution migration. “We have only been with Ânima on the project for a year Ulife and, in December 2024, we were able to expand our operations to the Engineering squad, which had been using another tool for about 10 years. In less than a year of partnership, we expanded the project significantly. More than that, our work has contributed to strengthening the culture of observability within the organization, adding strategic value to the operation”, says Plinio Moreira, Observability Manager at Delfia.
“Delfia was essential at strategic moments, from the initial instrumentation and understanding of our environment to identifying needs that we had not even mapped out, such as the use of logs — something that is now part of our daily routine and brings great value. During the migration, which involved the entire Ânima ecosystem and a much more complex environment, we relied on Delfia’s close support to overcome technical challenges. This support was essential for the success of the implementation. In addition, Delfia manages monthly consumption to avoid surprises. This gave us the confidence to move forward on other fronts,” says Thiago Prestes de Moraes, Value Stream Manager (VSM) at Ânima Educação.
Limited visibility and financial risk with cloud
Before Delfia’s curation, Ânima faced challenges such as a lack of detailed technical visibility and a rigid licensing model. The need for modernization intensified with the containerization of the platform Ulife — which started operating on AWS's EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) — requiring a more flexible solution adapted to the new infrastructure reality.
Delfia's entry represented a turning point, with a focus on economic efficiency and technical traceability. According to Ânima Educação's VSM, Datadog itself recommended Delfia, resulting in the beginning of a partnership journey.
“Delfia was able to effectively support Ânima in this evaluation and monitoring process, delivering consistent reports and controls that generated trust on the part of the client — which, in fact, paved the way for us to advance our work in other squads”, emphasizes Plinio Moreira, from Delfia.
Still, Ânima Educação had to overcome another challenge: the constant search for economic efficiency. “We had to present concrete gains and the impacts of not having an observability tool. We demonstrated how this solution was essential to guarantee stability, efficiency and continuity of operations,” reveals Thiago Prestes.
Rapid transition, strategic adoption and ongoing support
With less than a year of experience in the Datadog project-Ulife, Delfia led the full transition of the entire ecosystem environment, delivering the implementation ahead of schedule. The change encompassed not only Datadog in Ulife, but also engineering squads that still operated with the previous tool, consolidating Datadog as the group's official solution.
In addition to the major technical gains provided by the use of the tool and Delfia's support, Ânima Educação's technical team was able to improve incident response times, predictively enhance usability, and increase application performance. Today, the team measures, understands, and identifies opportunities for optimization, both in performance and user experience — in addition to generating resource savings.
Delfia also helped to consolidate the culture of observability in the company. Another improvement achieved with the solution was the achievement of visibility, which made the team ask themselves: 'why is this module so different from the others?'. With detailed metrics, it was possible to identify the cause with precision, such as which library was having an update problem. In addition to the operational gains, the use of Datadog's AI allowed the technical team to react quickly to failures, anticipate bottlenecks and establish efficient data governance.
Strategic results and next steps
With dashboards connected to infrastructure, usability and business data, Ânima is now targeting the next steps in observability: the use of strategic metrics to support corporate decisions.
“With observability, which is no longer just a technical thing, we can generate data, understand where our squad generates value and justify investments. Our challenge now is to integrate technical performance with user experience and business impact,” explains the executive at Ânima Educação. With the migration from Zoom to Teams, which involved managing class recordings, it was possible to generate business information within the platform itself, further expanding the strategic use of the tool.
Delfia continues to work as a partner for Ânima Educação on this journey, offering monthly usage reports, technical consulting, and providing training to increase Ânima’s internal maturity in observability practices. “With the solution, we were able to evolve by combining metrics, logs, and traces and extract important insights, such as the volume of recordings in Teams and even cost comparisons between tools. Visibility, even at the code level, saves time for technical teams and anticipates corrections. This shows, in practice, the value of observability,” concludes Ânima Educação’s VSM.
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