Datadog has introduced Journey Monitoring and Bits Testing to its Digital Experience Monitoring suite. The additions are designed to help teams track whether users complete key digital tasks.
The new products focus on user journeys such as checkout, sign-in and onboarding. In these areas, companies often know whether code deployed correctly but have less visibility into whether customers reached the intended outcome.
Journey Monitoring brings together conversion, traffic and availability data for each user journey in a single view. Datadog said this is intended to help engineering and product teams spot drops in conversion rates and trace their cause.
The tool also draws on data from Real User Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring and Product Analytics. By combining these sources, teams can view the same journey through operational performance, observed customer behaviour and product usage patterns.
It also analyses live user traffic to identify the paths customers most often take to reach the same result. The aim is to surface critical flows before a support complaint or outage report reveals a problem.
Journey Monitoring includes colour-coded health indicators and service level objective breach badges. It also maps links between journeys so teams can see whether an issue in one path is affecting related steps elsewhere in an application.
Testing shift
Bits Testing addresses the other side of the problem by focusing on pre-release checks and test maintenance as applications change. Datadog said it creates test coverage from plain-language prompts and uses goal-based testing that checks whether an outcome was achieved rather than replaying a fixed script.
That distinction matters because scripted tests can fail when an interface is redesigned, even if the user goal remains reachable. Bits Testing re-discovers paths at runtime, allowing tests to adapt as products evolve, according to Datadog.
Datadog also positioned the product as relevant for software features built with artificial intelligence, where outputs may vary from one run to the next. In those cases, checking for a successful result rather than an identical sequence of steps can be more practical than traditional scripted testing.
Bits Testing can generate a test suite spanning browser, application programming interface, network and goal-based tests from a text prompt, according to Datadog. The aim is to help teams expand coverage without writing code for each individual test.
Broader push
The launch adds to Datadog's effort to embed artificial intelligence more deeply across its observability and security products. The company framed both tools as part of a broader move to use automation not only to monitor systems in production but also to find, test and track important customer paths across applications.
Businesses have increasingly invested in observability tools to understand how software behaves after release, but digital teams still face a gap between system health metrics and customer success. A service can remain technically available while users struggle to complete a purchase, reset a password or finish onboarding.
That gap has drawn more attention as online services have grown more complex and product teams have come to rely on constant software updates. It has also become harder to maintain conventional end-to-end testing in products that change frequently or include AI-driven elements that do not return the same output every time.
Journey Monitoring and Bits Testing target those problems from different directions. One follows real-world usage in production, while the other aims to keep tests relevant before and after changes are introduced.
Yanbing Li, Chief Product Officer at Datadog, outlined the company's view of how AI should be used across software monitoring and testing.
"We don't think of AI as a feature you add to a product. We think of it as what should be running underneath everything - infrastructure, security and now the user journey. Journey Monitoring and Bits Testing apply that idea end-to-end to find the journeys that matter and use AI to keep testing them as the product changes," said Yanbing Li, Chief Product Officer at Datadog.
Li also described the two-way approach the company is taking with the new tools.
"Datadog provides visibility and operational control as AI creates complexity. We do so from two directions: agentic capabilities like Bits Testing that continuously test journeys, and those like Journey Monitoring that autonomously discover and observe the most critical customer paths," Li said.