Modulus Labs cuts incident response time by 40% with Datadog

Modulus Labs has overhauled its monitoring, security and incident response systems with Datadog, reducing mean time to resolution by more than 40 per cent.

The Philippines-based payments infrastructure provider also cut the time needed to detect payment transaction failures from minutes to seconds by bringing monitoring and security functions into one environment.

Modulus Labs operates across several jurisdictions, including Singapore, and serves enterprises, payment facilitators and independent software vendors managing payment flows across acquirers, devices and channels. It handles card-present, QR and eCommerce transactions in a PCI DSS-compliant cloud environment on AWS, where even short outages or delays can directly affect merchant revenue.

Previously, the business used separate tools for Kubernetes cluster monitoring, application performance monitoring, code scanning, on-call management and incident response. That created visibility gaps and forced teams to move between multiple dashboards when investigating performance issues, security risks and alerts.

Those constraints were particularly significant in a regulated payments environment, where real-time visibility across code, infrastructure and transactions was needed alongside strict compliance controls and tightly governed third-party integrations.

Mary Joy Oliveros, Head of Platform Engineering at Modulus Labs, described the burden of the earlier setup.

"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," Oliveros said.

She added: "We were dealing with fragmented visibility, switching between multiple dashboards and tools to correlate performance issues, security risks and alerts."

Single view

The new setup gives engineering and security teams a single operational view across application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring, cloud security, application security, synthetic monitoring, user monitoring and continuous integration checks.

It has enabled real-time service tracing to identify bottlenecks in payment flows. The platform also provides ongoing visibility into threats such as API misuse and suspicious logins, while helping teams identify vulnerabilities and compliance risks earlier in software development.

The shift was not only about closer system observation. It also improved collaboration by reducing context switching between tools and consolidating four platforms into a single view, lowering costs.

Oliveros said the change also improved the quality of information available during incidents.

"Before Datadog, monitoring meant noise and blind spots. Today, we have real-time clarity across every service," Oliveros said.

She added: "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."

Compliance demands

Integrating a third-party service into a PCI DSS-regulated payments environment brought its own challenges. The key issue was not the external platform's security position, but aligning the integration with Modulus Labs' internal controls and compliance requirements.

Using the system to detect code vulnerabilities before production reduced the risk of PCI DSS non-compliance. Real-time monitoring of APIs and infrastructure threats also helped identify potential breaches earlier.

Datadog executive Adrian Towsey said the project reflected the operational pressures facing cloud-based payments businesses working under strict security requirements.

"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 realize the full potential of their financial services," said Adrian Towsey, Vice President of Commercial Sales for Asia-Pacific and Japan at Datadog.

Oliveros said the company completed the integration without weakening its controls.

"Our security-first approach and technical expertise ensured our team was able to complete the integration successfully without weakening any controls or lowering our defences, proving that best-in-class security and modern observability can coexist," Oliveros said.