Datadog, Inc., the AI-powered observability and security platform for cloud applications, today announced that cloud payment infrastructure, Modulus Labs, improved uptime and reliability using the Datadog platform. Since deployment, Modulus Labs has centralised its monitoring and security, boosted issue detection and resolution efficiency, enhanced security and compliance, and lowered costs.
Headquartered in the Philippines and operating across multiple jurisdictions, Modulus Labs enables high-transaction enterprises, PayFacs, and ISVs to manage and route payment flows across acquirers, devices, and channels. Its versatile payment infrastructure powers card-present, QR, and e-commerce transactions within a highly regulated, PCI DSS-compliant AWS environment. For Modulus Labs, uptime is not a metric – it’s a contractual obligation, as even seconds of latency or downtime in payment processing can directly impact merchants’ revenue and customer trust.
Prior to Datadog, Modulus Labs relied on separate tools for Kubernetes cluster monitoring, application performance monitoring, code scanning, and on-call and incident response. This fragmented setup created visibility gaps in a payments environment where even seconds of downtime or security issues carry significant risk. While being a PCI DSS–regulated company, it must maintain secure, compliant pipelines with real-time visibility across code, infrastructure, and transactions, complicating third-party integrations.
Mary Joy Oliveros, Head of Platform Engineering at Modulus Labs
“Although these tools individually provided great value to us, they also required constant integration efforts, created visibility silos, and slowed down our ability to respond to issues,” said Mary Joy Oliveros, Head of Platform Engineering at Modulus Labs. “We were dealing with fragmented visibility, switching between the multiple dashboards and tools to correlate performance issues, security risks, and alerts.”
By introducing Datadog, Modulus Labs was able to bring together all aspects of its monitoring, security, and incident response into a single, streamlined environment. This consolidation has improved visibility across systems, enhanced collaboration between teams, and reduced the time required to detect and resolve issues. Modulus Labs can now proactively identify risks, ensure system reliability, and strengthen its overall security posture.
“Before Datadog, monitoring meant noise and blind spots. Today, we have real-time clarity across every service,” said Oliveros. “For a global payment infrastructure like Modulus Labs, Datadog is far more than a monitoring tool – it is our reliability guardrail, compliance enabler, and single source of operational truth.”
Modulus Labs leverages many of Datadog’s offerings through a single pane of glass view. Datadog’s centralised application performance monitoring (APM) and infrastructure monitoring gives the fintech platform real-time service tracing, enabling teams to quickly identify bottlenecks in payment flows. Integrated Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) and Application Security Monitoring (ASM) provide continuous visibility into threats such as API misuse and suspicious logins, helping protect sensitive payment data. Synthetic Monitoring and Real-User Monitoring (RUM) ensure end-to-end transaction uptime and customer experience, while Continuous Integration (CI) Visibility flags vulnerabilities and compliance risks early in the development pipeline.
Unified alerting and better performance issue detection and investigation has improved uptime and reliability. Modulus Labs’ Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) has been reduced by more than 40 per cent, while payment transaction failures are detected in seconds instead of minutes.
“The platform delivers a single pane of glass, with real-time alerts, anomaly detection, and automated incident workflows all in one place, eliminating the need for our teams to jump between multiple tools and configurations,” says Oliveros.
However, adopting a third-party service posed challenges for Modulus Labs due to strict PCI DSS requirements and a tightly governed AWS environment. The hurdle wasn’t the platform’s security posture, but aligning the integration to meet those high standards.
Detecting code vulnerabilities in pre-production through Datadog has reduced PCI DSS non-compliance risk, while real-time API and infrastructure threat detection helps prevent breaches. The integration also improved operational efficiency by consolidating four platforms into a single view, reducing context switching, improving collaboration, and lowering costs.
“Our security-first approach and technical expertise ensured our team was able to resolve the integration successfully without weakening any controls or lowering our defenses, proving that best-in-class security and modern observability can coexist,” said Oliveros.
Adrian Towsey, Vice President of Commercial Sales for Asia-Pacific and Japan at Datadog, said “For a cloud-based payment infrastructure operating under strict security requirements, centralized monitoring and security capabilities are not just operationally beneficial but vital to success. By improving issue detection and resolution, strengthening compliance and security, and reducing costs, Modulus Labs can focus on enabling its high-transacting customers to own their payment data and realise the full potential of their financial services.”
