QSIC Turns Up Retail Media Reliability with Datadog

Australia’s retail media audio platform strengthens uptime and scalability across 17,000 stores

Datadog, Inc. (NASDAQ: DDOG), the AI-powered observability and security platform for cloud applications, today announced that QSIC, the global in-store AI audio platform, has unified observability with Datadog to ensure consistent uptime, faster incident response, and a foundation for future AI-driven innovation across its expanding network of connected retail environments.

Operating in more than 17,000 stores globally, QSIC helps brands deliver tailored audio advertising and music experiences through connected in-store devices. QSIC’s rapid expansion led to growing complexity across thousands of connected IoT devices. With multiple monitoring tools and data sources in use, identifying the root cause of outages was time-consuming and reactive, sometimes taking days to resolve, impacting in-store ambience and advertiser delivery.

To address this, QSIC implemented Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring and Logs Management to gain a unified view of its IoT devices, servers, and applications, reducing blind spots and enabling engineers to detect and fix issues before they impact customers.

“Before we had Datadog, troubleshooting was like playing whack-a-mole,”

said Andrew Gobbo - General Manager, APAC at QSIC.

“If music or media stopped, it meant hours of digging through different systems to work out what went wrong. Now we can see issues in real time, act before stores notice, and keep the customer experience consistent.”

With Datadog’s Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and AI-powered anomaly detection, QSIC has been able to cut incident recovery times from days to hours and lighten the load on support teams. Instead of reacting to outages, engineers can identify potential issues early, such as network congestion or regional disruptions, and reach out to clients before playback or advertising is affected.

The improvement has had a direct impact. With uptime tied to ad delivery and retail experience, even small interruptions can affect both QSIC’s customers and end shoppers. Early detection and faster recovery have minimised service interruptions, helping retailers maintain atmosphere in stores and advertisers ensure campaigns run as planned.

QSIC’s visibility overhaul has also changed how teams operate. Dashboards built in Datadog now give both developers and operations staff a single, real-time view of network health, reducing hand-offs and improving collaboration during busy rollout periods. The team recently completed a 12,000-site deployment with fewer bottlenecks and faster troubleshooting than any previous rollout. 

“We can instantly see how devices and networks are performing, which means less firefighting, faster recovery, and a smoother experience for our retail customers and their shoppers,”

said Gobbo.

“And as our network grows, the challenge isn’t just keeping everything online, it’s making sure new technologies are just as reliable and secure, the better visibility we have, the more confidently we can innovate.”

Looking ahead, QSIC is expanding into AI-driven observability, exploring ways to monitor the behaviour of large language model-powered agents used in customer engagement and internal operations. The organisation is also evaluating new security monitoring features to safeguard against emerging threats, including prompt-injection attacks and data leakage in AI systems.

“Retail media relies on atmosphere, the rhythm, tone, and emotion that shape the shopping experience,”

said  Adrian Towsey, Vice President – Commercial APJ at Datadog.

“QSIC has captured that beautifully, blending technology and creativity to make every store sound as good as it looks. By pairing innovation with reliability, they’re showing how AI-powered retail experiences can scale globally without missing a beat.”

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About Datadog

Datadog is the observability and security platform for cloud applications. Our SaaS platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, user experience monitoring, cloud security and many other capabilities to provide unified, real-time observability and security for our customers’ entire technology stack.

Datadog is used by organisations of all sizes and across a wide range of industries to enable digital transformation and cloud migration, drive collaboration among development, operations, security and business teams, accelerate time to market for applications, reduce time to problem resolution, secure applications and infrastructure, understand user behaviour and track key business metrics.