Case Study: PayPal achieves enterprise-scale observability and faster debugging with Datadog

PayPal scales observability across global payment applications with Datadog and OpenTelemetry

PayPal, a global leader in digital payments serving hundreds of millions of consumers across brands like Venmo and Braintree, faced the challenge of gaining end-to-end observability across a massive, multi-cloud and on‑premises architecture (70k+ physical hosts, 400k+ containers, 200M+ metrics/min). The company needed a vendor‑neutral, scalable solution that preserved platform independence, supported rapid innovation, and provided deeper client‑side visibility for web and mobile apps.

PayPal standardized on OpenTelemetry and adopted Datadog with a hybrid approach (OTel collectors for core brands and Datadog agents elsewhere), plus a custom pipeline for sampling and processing. The integrated APM and RUM, out‑of‑the‑box dashboards, training programs, and observability champions delivered 24/7 monitoring, real‑time merchant and customer health visibility, faster root‑cause analysis and shorter debugging times, broad organizational adoption, and strong support during high‑visibility launches like Modular Checkout.

PayPal

Tapan Sanghvi

Director of Software Development