Datadog Monitors Cookie Run: Kingdom

Cookie Run: Kingdom is a mobile game that lets players build their own fantasy kingdom. The game is a spinoff of the Cookie Run series and was released in 2022.

Devsisters needed visibility into the health of their cloud-native applications, but their existing tools added complexity that made it difficult to pinpoint user-facing issues.

How Devsisters Scaled Their Game

Devsisters knew they had to build great experiences for a growing user base and improve speed to market. But the existing tools they used added complexity that made it difficult to get critical visibility into user-facing issues.

Cookie Run: Kingdom is the latest game in the Cookie Run series and the company’s most popular game to date with 8 million monthly active users (MUA). The team at Devsisters wanted to develop a RPG city-simulation game that integrated well with their existing OvenBreak and Cookie Run games but also captivated new audiences with its unique gameplay.

At peak traffic times, the game processes 2x its normal transaction rate — up to 60,000 transactions per second. The team needed a database that could keep up with this demand without sacrificing performance. Devsisters chose CockroachDB because it was built to scale automatically and easily. This means the team can spend less time monitoring their infrastructure and more time innovating on their product.

Devsisters Needed a Monitoring Solution

Devsisters had released other games based on the Cookie Run IP, but the breakaway success of Kingdom brought with it a heavier transactional workload than previous titles. With a variety of different metrics to track, the team needed a solution that could scale to their growing user base and keep pace with the game’s performance.

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With Datadog’s turn-key integrations and support for a wide range of dynamic and ephemeral systems, the team was able to reduce their monitoring complexity and spend more time focused on problem detection. They now watch for sudden spikes in concurrent users or coins per user, which often indicate that a player is hacking the system to gain an unfair advantage.

Devsisters Switched to Play Asset Delivery

Devsisters is a mobile game studio that produces casual games for users worldwide. Their popular Cookie Run series includes running arcade games like Cookie Run: OvenBreak and social RPGs such as Cookie Run: Kingdom. These titles generate a large amount of data, leading to high CDN costs.

In order to reduce costs, Devsisters started to use Play Asset Delivery, which allowed them to package up to 1GB of assets with the first time user download. This helped them reduce the CDN cost and improve first-time player experience without sacrificing performance.

In addition to providing a great gaming experience, Cookie Run: Kingdom also allows players to obtain free rewards with special coupon codes. These codes can be redeemed on the game’s official website or via instant messaging services such as KakaoTalk and LINE. Redeeming these codes is quick and easy. Once redeemed, the codes will automatically be applied to your account.

Devsisters Leveraged Datadog

Devsisters chose Datadog because of its flexibility and ease of use, along with built-in support for dynamic and ephemeral systems. The company also appreciated Datadog’s turn-key integrations that enabled them to monitor their entire tech stack on a single platform.

With a single, unified view of their entire application stack, the Devsisters team could easily spot issues and make operational changes to ensure that their game was always up and running for players. They were able to spend less time focusing on manual monitoring and more time iterating on their game.

Datadog’s comprehensive observability platform is designed to help teams like the Devsisters foster a culture of collaboration and accelerated development by providing all the tools they need in one place. From infrastructure metrics, logs and network performance to APM, serverless and continuous monitoring and more, we’re here to support every step of the DevOps journey. Learn more about our platform or get started with a free trial today.