PayMongo taps Datadog to boost payments reliability

PayMongo has adopted Datadog's platform to unify observability and security across its payments operation, helping the Southeast Asian payments company cut incident response times.

The Philippines-based company says the shift has enabled it to resolve 75 per cent of incidents before they affect merchants. Its mean time to restore has fallen from hours to minutes after bringing monitoring, alerting and security workflows onto one system.

The move addresses a core operational challenge for the fintech group as it scales in a regulated sector. Engineers had been working across separate tools, while security coverage varied across the organisation, making it harder to trace problems quickly across the payments stack.

PayMongo runs its business entirely in the cloud and processes billions of dollars in monthly payment volume. It provides businesses with services to accept payments, access capital and manage finances through a single platform, serving tens of thousands of merchants across Southeast Asia.

The unified setup gives teams visibility across the full payments flow and lets them correlate application, infrastructure and security signals more quickly. It has also changed how PayMongo handles outages involving payment partners: the system can detect disruptions in near real time, notify merchants and automatically pause affected payment methods.

These measures are intended to limit failed checkouts and reduce abandoned carts, a key metric for merchants that depend on continuous payment acceptance. In payments, even brief interruptions can immediately affect sales and customer trust, particularly during peak shopping periods.

Jose Dalino, Chief Product and Technology Officer at PayMongo, said transaction reliability had become a defining issue for the company as volumes increased.

"Every second of downtime means real money lost for the tens of thousands of businesses that rely on us to collect payments from their customers. Datadog was chosen to bring observability and security together in one place, addressing engineering teams' need for unified visibility and for reliability to scale alongside the business," Dalino said.

Operational shift

Beyond incident response, the consolidation has changed how PayMongo's engineering and security teams work together. By placing observability and security data on one platform, staff can view affected services and transactions in the same workflow when a threat or failure emerges.

This shared view is particularly important as the company's attack surface expands with more merchants, more payment methods and a larger engineering organisation. In a payments business, that combination can increase operational complexity as well as exposure to cyber threats.

Datadog's cloud security tools combine signals from endpoint protection, identity systems and network activity with application and infrastructure data. According to PayMongo, this has improved how quickly teams can move from detection to investigation and then to remediation.

The shift also extends into software development. Automated code scanning now helps identify vulnerabilities before they reach production, a growing concern as AI-generated code becomes more common in development workflows.

Dalino said the combined view of system performance and security had altered internal processes.

"Having security and observability on the same platform has fundamentally changed how our teams work. We can detect, investigate, and respond to threats faster because we have the full picture in one place," Dalino said.

He also linked the changes to the company's merchant relationships and its role during periods of heavy transaction demand.

"Through our usage of Datadog, our customers have increased their confidence in us. We've become their partner of choice for major sales events where near-zero downtime is non-negotiable.

Reliability is what earns trust in payments. Datadog gives us the visibility to deliver on that promise - at any scale, at any time," Dalino said.

Regional growth

PayMongo operates in a market where digital payments infrastructure has become increasingly important to small and mid-sized businesses seeking to sell online and manage cash flow through a single provider. As fintech groups broaden their services in Southeast Asia, reliability and security are becoming more important competitive factors alongside pricing and product range.

For cloud-based payment platforms, the need to monitor the full transaction path has also grown as companies rely on multiple third-party providers and APIs. An outage at one partner can quickly affect checkout completion rates if merchants and customers are not alerted fast enough.

Datadog said PayMongo's use of a single observability and security system shows how financial technology groups are trying to simplify operations while handling larger transaction volumes. Adrian Towsey, Vice President of Commercial Sales for Asia-Pacific and Japan at Datadog, said payments companies faced little tolerance for failure.

"As a financial operating system in a highly regulated sector, uptime, reliability, and security are non-negotiable. By unifying observability and security, PayMongo gains the visibility and control needed to scale with confidence. This allows it to maintain merchant trust, while driving broader business adoption of digital infrastructure, and redefining how businesses across the region access financial power," Towsey said.