Datadog strengthens API observability with Seekret acquisition

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 company specializing in API (application programming interface) observability. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Over the years, APIs have evolved into a core part of modern cloud applications. They sit as an intermediary and enable applications to talk to servers or other applications, building experiences and capabilities (like Google Maps’ support on Uber) that would otherwise be difficult to build. 

Even today, when it comes to managing and monitoring a growing number of APIs, many organizations struggle with technical challenges. Their manual monitoring methods often fail to keep up with the explosive growth. This can result in an inaccurate understanding of interdependencies, health, availability and security of APIs and how they affect the experiences of application users.

Seekret’s automated solution

With this acquisition, Datadog is looking to finally resolve this problem. According to the company, the Israeli organization provides a platform that automates the complete discovery process of both private and public APIs, visualizes dependencies between them and keeps up-to-date documentation at the rate of change. This gives customers an easy way to discover and manage APIs across their environments.

While Datadog has not shared specific details of the plan, it has confirmed that the company will bring key capabilities from Seekret into its security and observability offerings. Beyond this, it also plans to use the deal to develop features that could help developers and operations and security engineers better manage the health, availability and security of their APIs.

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

“Although synthetic monitoring can be valuable, the addition of Seekret offers a mechanism to non-invasively collect the equivalent of real-user monitoring (RUM) [in APM parlance] telemetry for APIs and substantially broadens API monitoring to include health, performance and security use cases that were previously unavailable,” Gregg Siegfried,  VP, analyst on the IT monitoring team within Gartner, told Venturebeat.  

“In addition, the product also includes some developer-friendly capabilities that line up well with Datadog’s CI visibility product,” he added.

Previous deals 

This is not the first time Datadog has moved 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 apps from vulnerabilities and attacks, and the developer of a tool for building observability pipelines. 

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

“Other products compete with portions of the Datadog platform –  some examples are Dynatrace in application and infrastructure monitoring, Splunk in log, application and infrastructure monitoring, Sysdig in container infrastructure and security monitoring and the hyperscale cloud providers with respect to workloads running in their respective clouds. In a crowded space like modern monitoring, there is something for everyone.  Other solutions may be faster, affordable or more suitable for specific use cases. Still, it is a challenge to find another monitoring platform that matches Datadog’s breadth,” Siegfried emphasized.