Growing transaction volumes demand a new approach to observability

PayMongo started as a payment gateway and has grown into a financial operating system for businesses across the Philippines—from small enterprises taking their first steps into digital commerce to the country’s largest e-commerce marketplaces and enterprise platforms. By giving merchants the tools to accept payments, access capital, and manage their finances, PayMongo is helping bring more Filipino businesses into the digital economy. Running entirely on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company has grown transaction volumes nearly 25 times over in just 18 months, processing billions in monthly payment volume today.

Operating at that scale in a regulated environment leaves little room for error. As a regulated financial institution, PayMongo is held to strict standards by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas—the Central Bank of the Philippines. “Uptime and transaction reliability are absolutely mission-critical for us,” says Jose Dalino, CTO. “Every second of downtime means real money lost for the thousands of businesses that rely on us to collect payments from their customers.”

As the business scaled, the engineering team recognized that the observability and security foundations underpinning their financial operating system needed to evolve to match their ambitions. Teams had built up their own toolsets as the company grew, and it created a more complex operational environment as transaction volumes increased. A more unified view would allow engineers to investigate and respond more quickly, without switching between multiple systems at the moment speed mattered most.

To maintain the level of reliability their merchants depended on, the team needed end-to-end visibility across the full payments flow, from the moment a customer checked out through every step of the process. Security needed the same attention. With teams having adopted different tools over time, standardizing security coverage across the organization and integrating it more tightly with the rest of the engineering stack would give the security team the consistent, centralized visibility they needed to stay ahead of threats.

PayMongo needed a single platform that could bring observability and security together, so engineers could correlate signals across the full payments flow, and reliability could scale alongside the business.

From reactive to proactive: protecting merchants at scale

PayMongo selected Datadog to address each of these needs in one place. By bringing Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Log Management, Real User Monitoring, and Synthetic Monitoring together under one roof, engineers investigating an incident had everything they needed without jumping between tools.

With observability centralized, the team gained something they hadn’t had before: the ability to follow a payment from the moment a customer checks out through every step of the process. With the full journey of a payment visible in one place, investigations that once took hours now take minutes. “For a payments company, having complete visibility into every step of a transaction, and the confidence to act on it instantly, is how we keep our merchants’ checkouts running,” says Dalino.

To prevent issues before they reached merchants, PayMongo built automated monitoring and incident response workflows into their operations. Using Watchdog anomaly detection, SLO-based alerting, and Synthetic Monitoring, issues are now surfaced and resolved automatically. Today, 75% of incidents are detected and resolved before causing any customer impact, and mean time to restore has dropped from hours to minutes. When a payment partner experiences an outage, PayMongo can detect it in near real time, notify merchants, and temporarily pause affected payment methods—ensuring customers are only presented with payment options that work, protecting the checkout experience, and reducing abandoned carts.

The result is a more resilient financial operating system that PayMongo’s merchants and partners can depend on. “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,” says Dalino.

“Reliability is what earns trust in payments. Datadog gives us the visibility to deliver on that promise—at any scale, at any time.”

Security and compliance built into the development process

As PayMongo has grown, so has the surface area it needs to protect. More merchants, more payment methods, and a growing engineering team all mean more potential points of exposure. For PayMongo, getting security right is not just a technical requirement—it directly affects the company’s ability to retain merchant trust, satisfy regulators, and keep growing.

Consolidating security onto the same platform as observability gave PayMongo a fundamentally new way to operate—a complete, correlated view of threats across its entire environment. With Cloud SIEM, security signals from endpoint protection, identity tools, and network activity are now connected to application and infrastructure data in real time. Instead of triaging alerts in isolation, when a threat is detected, the security team can immediately pivot from a signal to the impacted services, transactions, and users, to understand both the threat and its business impact in seconds. The same consolidation that makes incident response faster has also made compliance simpler—dedicated SOC dashboards give auditors a continuous, centralized view of security activity, reducing what was once a weeks-long evidence collection process to less than a day.

PayMongo’s engineering culture is built on disciplined development practices: peer review, automated testing, and layered security controls across every change that reaches production. Code Security is part of that baseline. Embedded directly into the development workflow, it scans for vulnerabilities, insecure dependencies, and misconfigurations on every commit—catching issues early, before they have a chance to reach production. “Code Security gives us a consistent, automated layer of review on every change,” says Dalino. “It’s how we hold a high security bar across a growing engineering organization without slowing the team down.”

“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.”

The reliability that makes growth possible

PayMongo continues to expand its financial operating system for Filipino commerce into new product lines, platform partnerships, and more sophisticated fraud detection capabilities. With Datadog embedded across every layer of that expansion, the team has the visibility and control to move quickly without sacrificing reliability.

That foundation is what makes the mission possible. With the confidence to scale, PayMongo can focus on bringing more Filipino businesses into the digital economy and building the next generation of commerce infrastructure in the Philippines.