Datadog Strengthens API Observability with Acquisition of Seekret

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New York-based Datadog, which provides a security-focused cloud monitoring platform for enterprise applications and infrastructure, has announced the acquisition of Seekret, an Israeli observability company APIs (application programming interface). Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Over the years, APIs have become a central part of modern cloud applications. They mediate and allow apps to communicate with servers or other apps, creating experiences and capabilities (like Google Maps support on Uber) that would otherwise be difficult to create.

Even today, when it comes to managing and monitoring an increasing number of APIs, many organizations face technical challenges. Their manual monitoring methods often fail to keep up with the explosive growth. This can lead to an inaccurate understanding of API interdependencies, health, availability, and security and how they affect the application user experience.

With this acquisition, Datadog seeks to finally solve this problem. According to the company, the Israeli organization provides a platform that automates the entire discovery process of private and public APIs, visualizes dependencies between them, and maintains up-to-date documentation as changes occur. This allows customers to easily discover and manage APIs in their environments.

While Datadog did not share specific details of the plan, it did confirm that the company will integrate key Seekret features into its security and observability offerings. Beyond that, he also plans to use the agreement to develop features that could help developers and operations and security engineers better manage the health, availability, and security of their APIs. p>

Since 2010, Datadog has provided developers and security teams with tools to monitor everything in their stack, aggregating metrics and events across their servers, applications, and databases and presenting the data in a single unified view. API observability was also part of the effort. However, beyond API implementations that were explicitly instrumented by developers, API monitoring with Datadog has largely been limited to synthetic testing - the initiation of pre-programmed requests or transactions to data endpoints. API to measure availability and performance.

“While synthetic monitoring can be useful, the addition of Seekret provides a mechanism to non-invasively collect the equivalent of real user monitoring (RUM) telemetry [in APM] for APIs and dramatically expands API monitoring to include health, performance and security use cases that weren't previously available," said Gregg Siegfried, VP, IT Monitoring Team Analyst at from Gartner, to Venturebeat.

"In addition, the product also includes developer-friendly features that align well with Datadog's CI visibility product," he added.

This isn't the first time Datadog has sought to improve its offering through an acquisition. A few months ago, the company acquired a real-time collaboration tool called CoScreen. Last year, it also acquired a live debugging solution (Ozcode), a cybersecurity startup (Sqreen) that helps developers monitor and protect their web applications from vulnerabilities and attacks, and the developer of a tool for creating observability pipelines.

In total, the total number of acquisitions made by Datadog (including Seekret) amounts to ten. It competes with players like Dynatrace and Splunk.

“Other products compete with parts of the Datadog platform: e.g. Dynatrace in application and infrastructure monitoring, Splunk in log, application and infrastructure monitoring , Sysdig in container infrastructure and security monitoring and...