Observability · Australian Open 2025
Tennis Australia contacted Fitzroy IT - a Datadog Advanced Partner - prior to the 2025 Australian Open, as they required assistance to integrate their network monitoring and alerting into Datadog and to create an “at-a-glance” dashboard for their Operations Team.
Fitzroy IT swung into action immediately, implementing monitoring agents, configuring SNMP and setting up over 1500 monitors and alerts, and creating a master dashboard, with 20 child dashboards that gave a snapshot of network health across the tournament.
When incidents did occur, the Operations Team were immediately able to see what the issue was and where, and take restorative action, without having to undertake a lengthy investigation.
The Australian Open is an incredible sporting event featuring the world’s best tennis players, and behind-the-scenes it is an incredible feat of operational logistics, coordinating technology for broadcast, scoring, electronic line monitoring, communications and operations on and off-court.
In the lead up to the 2025 event, Tennis Australia were looking to implement a monitoring strategy for their various tournament networks, in-particular the network associated with on-court operations, such as the electronic line-calling system. Failures with this network, or any devices attached to it, would immediately cause play to be suspended on the affected court.
The key challenges for Tennis Australia were:
As a Datadog Advanced Partner, Fitzroy IT work closely with Datadog to provide consulting and implementation services, and provide valuable resources, support, and opportunities to help businesses succeed in the observability space.
And while Datadog expertise was certainly a significant factor, it was Fitzroy IT’s broader knowledge of networks and systems, as well as its ability to quickly move friendly, highly capable staff members onto the project that really made the choice easy.
Tennis Australia was already using Datadog because of its strengths as a monitoring and analytics platform for the IT, applications and network teams. It provides comprehensive monitoring, real-time insights, extensive integrations, an intuitive interface, and efficient troubleshooting.
It was the logical choice when it was time to expand their monitoring of networks and network devices, during the 2025 Australian Open.
After initially experimenting with Datadog’s Meraki Cloud integration, it was determined that utilising SNMPv3 for monitoring, via a local Datadog agent would provide more detailed metrics in real-time.
Monitors were implemented for all core switches to track up/down status and traffic throughput. Then monitors were created for all network ports servicing the courts at Melbourne Park. While it was known that not all ports would be used, having all port monitors defined allowed maximum flexibility while patching was finalised. When the network roll-out was complete, it was just a case of muting monitors for ports that weren’t in use.
A robust naming and tagging strategy was crucial in creating the dashboards used during the event. Monitors were rolled up into groups, based on which Court they were servicing, and a Dashboard with one status indicator for each Court was created. Thus if any one network device went offline, the Dashboard widget would instantly turn red, and the at fault monitor indicate the source of the problem.
AO2025 Master Dashboard
Additionally each Court had detailed dashboards which showed graphs of Inbound and Outbound:
Detailed Dashboard for Rod Laver Arena
All monitors were configured to send an alert notification to onsite Operations personnel when an error occurred.
The implementation of network monitoring at the Australian Open 2025 was a success. After the implementation of SNMP monitoring, and the creation of over 1500 monitors, and 21 dashboards, Tennis Australia had complete observability of their environment.
The monitors were utilised during the network rollout to highlight a number of cabling issues, which would otherwise have been very difficult to detect. And during the running of the tournament, the Master Dashboard was used in the Operations Centre, to quickly identify and remedy faults (of which there were very few, due to Tennis Australia’s great planning in building resilience and redundancy into their networks).
For AO2026, several improvements and expansions are being considered:
// Work with us
Book a Discovery Session