Datadog’s new Bits AI Security Analyst is now available to all customers. The company claims that it will reduce the time it takes to do a threat investigation by 98%. Its claim will appeal to Security Operations Centres (SOCs). They are drowning. The sheer volume of alerts, the speed of modern attacks, and the chronic shortage of skilled analysts means that critical threats often slip through the cracks.
Yanbing Li, Chief Product Officer at Datadog, said, “One-in-four Fortune 500 companies rely on Datadog Security to help them detect, prioritize and remediate threats, vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
“We are already a trusted partner and we continuously evolve our Cloud SIEM capabilities to directly face today’s sophisticated threats, especially as GenAI attacks intensify.
“To combat modern attacks, SOCs need intelligent, autonomous systems that can investigate and report clearly. That’s exactly what Bits AI Security Analyst delivers—a trusted AI agent that acts as an always-on senior SOC analyst teammate.”
How does this work?
First, this is not about replacing the human analyst. Datadog is adamant about that. This is a partnership between the human SOC analyst and an AI tool that uses a range of techniques to deliver faster investigation times.
Traditional SIEMS are a bottleneck. They suck in vast amounts of data and generate an increasing number of alerts. According to Tim Knudsen, Vice President of Security Products at Datadog, “Traditional SIEMs are leaving enterprises increasingly exposed because queues keep growing and investigations take longer to correlate and enrich context.”
The solution is to pair the Datadog Bits Security Analyst with its Cloud SIEM. That means that everything works at machine speed. It correlates those alerts, gathers evidence, runs investigations, and escalates issues. It also does this 24/7 across every signal channel from cloud to identity and EDR.
Investigations that drag on due to the processing of data are now completed in minutes, not hours or days. There is no waiting for information from other teams or from people in other time zones.
This delivers a mean time to resolution (MTTR) 90% faster than before. With GenAI-powered attacks becoming the norm, speed = defence.
What does this deliver for security teams?
Datadog says that security teams get three benefits: faster detection, broader coverage, and enterprise-grade scale.
- Detect and resolve issues faster: Bits AI doesn’t just alert. It acts by autonomously investigating, correlating data, and escalating only what matters. No more manual triage. No more chasing false positives. Security teams can focus on high-impact threats, not low-priority noise. That means reduced alert fatigue, faster mean time to detection, and, critically, faster mean time to resolution. All at machine speed.
- Gain comprehensive coverage: Modern attacks don’t stay in one place. They move across clouds, identities, and endpoints. Bits AI provides a unified view of the entire attack surface. It goes deeper than the symptom to find the root cause, the context, and the potential impact. Whether it’s a compromised cloud instance, a suspicious login, or a misconfigured container, Bits AI connects the dots automatically.
- Scale at enterprise grade: Datadog’s Cloud SIEM is built for scale. It can handle thousands of integrations, has a unified user experience, and security controls like RBAC. Bits AI Security Analyst inherits that scale. This is enterprise-level security done faster, smarter, and with fewer resources.
Importantly, this reduces the workload of human analysts. They can learn from the reports and the outcomes of investigations, and follow the logic that the Bits AI Security Analyst provides. The AI does the grunt work, the repetitive tasks, the noise. The human analysts are free to focus on strategy, innovation, and the high-impact threats that require human judgment.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This is about using the technology to enhance, not replace, security analysts. By making this a partnership approach, Datadog is giving SOC teams what they lack most – time. It is removing the work that creates a time suck and allowing analysts to get back to what they want to do. The value to the business is lower MTTR for real threats and less time lost to false positives.
For CISOs, this is about a deliverable that doesn’t mean asking the board for more money for additional tools. They get a solution that doesn’t add further complication into the security tool space. More importantly, they get something that delivers measurable value.
