How MyFitnessPal modernizes security operations with Datadog Cloud SIEM

MyFitnessPal is the world’s leading nutrition and calorie tracking app, serving over 15 million monthly active users. Despite operating with fewer than 300 employees, the company must secure a vast and dynamic technology environment. Their security team, which includes just three people, faced a critical challenge: scale security operations without scaling overhead.

After rebuilding their infrastructure from scratch, MyFitnessPal initially chose a Datadog competitor for security operations. However, that platform’s high operational demands quickly became unsustainable. “We were spending an estimated 200 hours per year just administering our SIEM,” says Allen Cox, senior director of security and IT at MyFitnessPal. “That’s nearly four hours per week we could be spending on process maturity or building better detection pipelines.”

The security team found themselves caught in a maintenance treadmill. Technical add-ons consumed excessive resources, requiring constant manual tuning. With only two hands-on engineers, managing the platform became an unsustainable burden. Security data also lived separately from engineering observability tools, creating fragmented visibility during investigations.

MyFitnessPal migrated to Datadog Cloud SIEM to reduce administrative overhead and consolidate their platforms. “As we evaluated Datadog Cloud SIEM, we saw 5x faster search speeds compared to our previous product,” Cox notes. “We weren’t expecting that—especially since performance was a key reason we initially chose [the former product].”

The results have been transformative. MyFitnessPal now saves 20 hours per week on administrative tasks and achieved 30% license cost savings. The team reduced AWS egress costs by $120,000 and improved incident response times by 20%. Datadog’s Flex Logs feature enables 365 days of searchable log retention without cold storage rehydration delays. “We used to archive data after 90 days, and rehydrating that took days,” says Cox. “Now we can search a year’s worth of logs without additional cost.”

Now freed from operational maintenance burdens, MyFitnessPal’s security team is focused on advancing their program rather than just maintaining it. “This move lets us break free from the treadmill of daily operational maintenance,” Cox concludes. “We’re no longer just staying afloat—we’re making progress.”