Philippine fintech PayMongo is using unified observability and security to reduce incident response times and strengthen the reliability of its payments platform.
The company, which provides payment acceptance, capital and financial management services to businesses, runs its operations entirely in the cloud and processes billions of dollars in monthly payment volume.
As its transaction volumes grew several times over the past 18 months, PayMongo found that managing reliability through fragmented monitoring and security tools was becoming increasingly difficult.
Jose Dalino, Chief Product and Technology Officer at PayMongo, said, “Uptime and transaction reliability are absolutely mission-critical for us. 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.”
PayMongo has consolidated observability and security through Datadog, giving engineering teams a common view across applications, infrastructure and payment flows.
Dalino said the approach has helped the firm resolve 75 percent of incidents before they reach merchants, while mean time to restore has fallen from hours to minutes.
Datadog's automated monitoring, anomaly detection, service-level objective alerting and synthetic monitoring to identify potential issues earlier and trigger responses.
For example, PayMongo can detect when a payment partner becomes unavailable, notify merchants and automatically pause affected payment methods. The approach is designed to reduce disruption at checkout and build resilient operating system.
“For a payments company, having complete visibility into every step of a transaction and the confidence to act on it instantly is a game changer,” Dalino said.
As PayMongo added more merchants, payment methods and engineers, its attack surface expanded. The company therefore sought to bring security signals together with application and infrastructure data rather than managing security as a separate operational function.
Its use of cloud security information and event management allows security and engineering teams to correlate signals from areas including identity, endpoints and network activity with application and infrastructure data.
PayMongo is also addressing security risks associated with the growing use of AI-generated code. Its development teams are using code-security scanning to identify vulnerabilities before code reaches production.
“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.
