Datadog: Agentic AI will reshape observability and security in Southeast Asia
Agentic capabilities in observability and cybersecurity can make a difference because cyberattacks happen at rapid pace with many actions needed, explains Yadi Narayana, Regional Field CTO (APJ) at Datadog
According to Yadi Narayana, Regional Field CTO (APJ) at Datadog, there are currently two trends in the region that organizations are dealing with. First, there is a need to change the observability of security postures among businesses today.
Narayana shared that observability is not just about seeing what is happening. Instead, he stated that it should be how fast organizations can act to what they are seeing.
“The trend we see is that organizations now realize that it's not possible humanly to scale everything and because the variance is too fast,” he said.
The second trend is the adoption of AI. Whether businesses are ok with it or not, they need to adopt AI in many use cases if they want to stay with the competition. But knowing the risk that comes with AI adoption is imperative for organizations today.
Interestingly, while Narayana pointed out that there's far more awareness on AI in Singapore in terms of policies, he sees Malaysia and Indonesia taking the lead when it comes to AI preparedness in the infrastructure side.
“So, there are digital natives who are always ahead of the game. There are a lot of good digital natives based in this region but not just in Singapore but around Southeast Asia as well. Because they are such an early adopter of technology, they look for the latest and greatest when it comes to observability and security. And because Datadog is predominantly a R&D centric company, they use our solutions because we keep adding more and more features,” Narayana explained.
Agentic capabilities in observability and security
Narayana explained that agentic capabilities in observability and cybersecurity can make a difference because the problem now is that attacks happen at rapid pace with many actions needed.
“AI has enabled an exponential ability to attack because the attackers don't care about the consequences. They can keep attacking right. I don't need to be right all the time. But as the defenders need to be right every time. So how do you really mitigate that risk? It is not when an attack or breach happens. The fundamental problem is that you still need to find the root cause, contain it, patch it, and do all sorts of things. You also need to have evidence to say why the attack happened,” he explained.
As such, Narayana believes that this becomes a multi-fold problem.
“My argument here is that it is all about trust. So how much trust do you have on your system? In this case, the trust is going to be in the agentic AI capabilities that is going to give you assurance that you have a little more control over the whole approach,” he added.
Bits AI
For Narayana, when it comes to observability and security with AI, the hardest and real soul for any system is good data.
“You give any AI any bad data, it's not going to work. So, the core of Datadog has always been that we built this whole foundation around good data models. None of the Datadog products are unified at the UI level. It is at a model level that is unified. For any product we acquire or do, it is integrated at that level. This means we can easily apply AI on top of already a very good database, a data level,” he said.
“That's a core differentiator for us. We always had a core strength of unifying signals from this different data set, and we can then apply patterns and AI on top of it. So that's something which is very hard. And when you have all these signals operating in the same context, you can get the answers faster. That's the game here,” he added.
As a platform, Datadog has introduced AI at every layer. Bits AI is Datadog's family of autonomous, agentic AI teammates built to handle SRE (Site Reliability Engineering), security operations, and observability workflows in real time
“Bits AI, which is our series of agentic AI capabilities, can start doing very basic things like root cause analysis to try to help organizations fix an issue or try to find all those security gaps. You don't even need to shift from your existing security. You can just route the signals to us, and we can give you that threat and your detection capabilities”
For Narayana, Bits AI is all about plugging the hole by leveraging AI with the Datadog components and fixing it.
“Bits AI is our predominant AI capability. And we can do that today because we invest massively on R&D, and we have also invested a lot on our own models,” he said.
It’s also one of the reasons why Datadog is recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave: AI Ops Platforms, Q4 2026 as well as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, 2026 for the sixth consecutive year.