Greg Reeder
Geoffrey Carlisle
As government agencies modernize infrastructure and migrate sensitive workloads to the cloud, the stakes for maintaining strict compliance and security standards are higher than ever. Building on our commitment to the US public sector, Datadog is proud to announce that we’ve achieved "In Process" status for FedRAMP® High authorization. This is another milestone on our path to providing the highest level of cloud security and observability for government agencies.
This designation allows government IT leaders and engineers to prepare for full-stack observability at the highest federal compliance level. In this post, we’ll explain what FedRAMP High means, why observability is essential for secure modernization, and how Datadog supports this mission.
What is FedRAMP High?
The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) defines FedRAMP High as the most rigorous security baseline. It applies to cloud systems that store or process data where a breach could have catastrophic effects on operations or individuals. These systems often include:
- Financial data and taxpayer services
- Protected Health Information (PHI)
- Law enforcement, public safety, and homeland security systems
- Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI)
- Emergency services and disaster response platforms
Cloud platforms supporting these use cases must meet NIST 800-53 Rev. 5 High Baseline controls, demonstrating a strong commitment to secure cloud operations.
Why Having FedRAMP High authorization matters for observability
Compliance is essential—but it’s just the starting point. Government IT teams also need real-time insight across their hybrid and multi-cloud systems to detect anomalies, resolve issues, and meet evolving mandates like OMB M-21-31, EO 14144, and TIC 3.0.
With a FedRAMP High–authorized observability solution, agencies can:
- Prevent downtime and disruptions to mission-critical services
- Gain actionable insights into infrastructure and application performance
- Proactively monitor for misconfigurations or suspicious behavior
- Support Zero Trust principles and incident response workflows
- Optimize operations for speed, security, and scale
Unified monitoring for secure government workloads
Government agencies face persistent challenges with tool sprawl, siloed data, and limited visibility across complex environments. The need for efficiency and optimization drives the increasing requirement for integrated solutions that provide comprehensive visibility into complex environments.
Datadog addresses these challenges with a single, unified platform that provides end-to-end visibility into the health, performance, and security of your complex environments. With Datadog, teams can:
- Monitor performance metrics across their entire infrastructure and network, from on-premises servers and devices to cloud services, Kubernetes clusters, and more than 800 other technologies
- Collect distributed traces to measure application performance and identify bottlenecks before they cause customer impact
- Identify and triage security threats and vulnerabilities across their infrastructure and applications
- Ingest, process, and store logs for deep analysis and adherence to federal logging mandates
Additionally, Datadog’s AI-powered anomaly detection engine, Watchdog, automatically and continuously monitors your environment to surface and alert you to issues before they impact users.
What can you achieve with FedRAMP High-authorized observability from Datadog?
FedRAMP High-authorized observability with Datadog supports ongoing efforts to modernize federal IT operations by providing agencies with a secure, unified platform that delivers more than just compliance—it powers better decision-making, operational agility, and measurable cost savings.
Here’s how Datadog helps government succeed, securely, efficiently, and at scale:
Gain full visibility
Datadog provides full visibility into system health across hybrid, multi-cloud, and containerized environments. Teams can monitor Kubernetes clusters, VMs, and serverless workloads—all in one place.
For example, if a DevOps team at a federal benefits agency is rolling out AI-powered digital services across AWS GovCloud and Azure Government resources, they can build a unified dashboard to visualize key latency metrics, container health, and API performance across the hybrid environment. When a latency spike threatens service delivery, Datadog automatically alerts them of a backend issue. The team quickly identifies and fixes the problem, restoring performance without disrupting the citizen experience.
Resolve security and performance issues faster
Quickly identifying and remediating security threats and vulnerabilities is vital in modern IT environments. Datadog integrates with each layer of your stack and so can detect potential attacks and misconfigurations across your code, infrastructure, production applications, endpoints, and more. Once you detect a problem, you can take action and remediate from within Datadog. For example, a DevOps engineer at a financial agency receives an alert for a suspicious login attempt. The engineer can investigate the login, block the IP address, and update access controls within minutes, all without leaving Datadog.
Control cloud costs
Understanding and managing total cost of ownership (TCO) is critical for public-sector IT teams facing strict budgets and procurement oversight. Datadog Cloud Cost Management helps agencies embed FinOps awareness into their development processes by giving engineers and analysts visibility into the costs of their services. Teams can easily use Datadog to monitor resource utilization and cost across compute, database, and storage layers and identify underutilized or misallocated infrastructure, all within a single platform. This enables them to find opportunities to rightsize workloads and reduce cloud spend.
Prepare for FedRAMP High authorization with Datadog
Datadog is already FedRAMP Moderate-authorized, and with its new FedRAMP High "In Process" designation, government teams can confidently begin preparing for high-impact workloads:
- Start monitoring today in Datadog’s FedRAMP Moderate region
- Align your environment with a vendor on the path to FedRAMP High
- Reduce Authority to Operate (ATO) delays by working with a proven, security-first platform
- Scale observability as your mission evolves
How FedRAMP High-authorized observability empowers government IT teams
| Role | Benefit |
|---|---|
| CIO/CTO | Modernize faster, reducing tool sprawl |
| CISO | Strengthen cloud security posture, streamline audits |
| DevOps/SRE | Detect, investigate, and resolve incidents |
| Program Manager | Ensure service uptime and performance transparency |
Datadog empowers technical teams across agencies to meet operational goals without sacrificing security, compliance, or cost control.
Continuing our commitment to government security
The FedRAMP High In-Process milestone reflects the next step in Datadog’s commitment to the public sector. We are on the path to full FedRAMP High authorization and DoD IL5 readiness to support the most sensitive federal workloads.
Get started with Datadog for Government
Datadog’s observability platform is trusted by leading government agencies and public-sector teams. Contact our Federal Sales or SLED Sales team to get started with FedRAMP High. Or get started with a free 14-day trial.
