Real-Time Security: Detect & Respond Before It's Too Late

Before we delve in this very important subject, here's some company news:

?? Company Highlights

KineticSkunk Achieves AWS Advanced Tier Status and ECS Service Delivery Designation We're thrilled to announce that KineticSkunk has been recognised as an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner and has achieved the Amazon ECS Service Delivery designation. This milestone showcases our expertise in delivering scalable, cloud-native solutions using AWS. Read about it in the press release here.

Partnership with LambdaTest to Elevate Cloud-Based Testing We've joined forces with LambdaTest, a leading cloud-based testing provider, to help businesses accelerate software testing and innovation. This partnership will enhance end-to-end testing capabilities, performance monitoring, and DevOps efficiencies for modern development teams. Read about it in the press release here.

Feature article: Real-Time Threat Detection and Incident Response with Datadog

Author: Donovan Mulder Reading time: 6 minutes

Introduction: The Necessity of Real-Time Threat Detection

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, cyber threats evolve rapidly, necessitating real-time visibility for security teams to detect and respond before incidents escalate. Many organisations struggle with fragmented data, delayed alerts, and manual investigation workflows.

Datadog provides a unified security monitoring solution that enables teams to detect, investigate, and mitigate threats in real time, reducing response time and minimising the impact of security breaches.

This guide explores how Datadog facilitates real-time threat detection and response, along with best practices and a real-world case study of how Arc XP enhanced their security posture using Datadog's Application Security Management (ASM).

The Challenge: Slow Incident Response and Fragmented Security Data

Common pain points for security teams:

• Delayed threat detection: Traditional security tools often detect incidents too late.
• Siloed security logs: Lack of correlation between logs, traces, and metrics slows investigation.
• Manual remediation: Without automation, incident response is slow and reactive.
• Alert fatigue: Security teams struggle with too many alerts and not enough context.

The Solution: Full-Stack Security Monitoring in Datadog

Datadog bridges these gaps by correlating security logs, application traces, and infrastructure metrics into a single pane of glass for real-time analysis and automated incident response.

How Datadog Enables Real-Time Threat Detection

Anomaly Detection & AI-Driven Insights

• Automatically detect unusual patterns in network activity, failed login attempts, and API calls.
• Reduce false positives by correlating security alerts with historical trends.

Out-of-the-Box Security Rules & SIEM Integration

• Pre-configured MITRE ATT&CK?-aligned detection rules for common threats.
• Integrate Datadog with SIEM and SOAR platforms to streamline security workflows.

Automated Security Alerts & Response

• Configure threshold-based security alerts for real-time detection.
• Automate incident response workflows—trigger Slack, PagerDuty, or AWS Security Hub alerts.

Log Correlation & Threat Investigation

• Investigate threats faster by linking logs, network traffic, and system performance data.
• Gain full context into security events without manually stitching together information.

Case Study: Arc XP Enhances Security with Datadog's ASM

Arc XP, a cloud-native digital experience platform, sought to boost its security monitoring capabilities to quickly detect and respond to attacks on its web applications and APIs. They needed a solution that provided real-time visibility into malicious activities targeting their environment.

Solution: Implementing Datadog's Application Security Management

• Enabled code-level context to identify exact functions where potential vulnerabilities were triggered.
• Provided actionable insights, including alerts for potentially malicious requests from trusted resources.
• Improved collaboration among development, security, and operations teams by serving as a single source of truth.

Outcome:

• Enhanced ability to detect and respond to security threats in real time.
• Improved total cost of ownership by enabling ASM from APM without extra agents.
• Increased release velocity with minimal additional effort for monitoring new features.

"Datadog ASM can quickly pinpoint an attack or unusual activity that we need to check out." — Roman Garber, Application Security Engineer at Arc XP

Best Practices for Implementing Datadog Security Monitoring

• Enable real-time security dashboards: Centralise logs, metrics, and traces for full-stack security observability.
• Customise detection rules: Tailor anomaly detection and security alerts to your infrastructure.
• Automate incident response: Reduce manual investigation time with auto-remediation actions.
• Correlate security signals: Link security logs with application and infrastructure performance data for faster root cause analysis.

Conclusion: Strengthening Security Posture with Datadog

The faster security teams can detect and contain threats, the lower the risk of operational and reputational damage. Datadog’s real-time security monitoring empowers teams to:

• Detect security threats instantly.
• Automate incident response workflows.
• Reduce investigation time with log correlation.
• Mitigate risk with full-stack observability.

Want to see this in action? Join us this week as we continue our deep dive into security monitoring with Datadog.

How does your team currently handle security incident response? Let’s discuss in the comments below!

Thank you for reading KineticSkunk? Insights. Stay tuned for our next edition, where we'll explore more innovations in cloud computing and security.