SC

Strategy Canon

Datadog: sourced choices

29 product and go-to-market choices, oldest first. Back to the case study

  1. 2010Product · Origin The founders set out in 2010 to build a real-time data integration platform to break down silos between development and operations teams. DD1
  2. 2010Product · Customer research The founders wrote no code for the first six months and talked to potential users. DD20
  3. 2010-12Product · Agent The agent repository on GitHub was created in December 2010. DD31
  4. 2012Product · First product Infrastructure monitoring launched in 2012, purpose-built for ephemeral cloud architectures. DD1
  5. 2012Go_To_Market · Launch price Planned at $12 per instance a month, the product launched at $15; a later rise to $18 did not change metrics. DD19
  6. 2012Go_To_Market · Demand generation DevOps content and community conferences such as DevOpsDays (a first booth of about $2,000) generated inbound interest. DD19
  7. 2012-10Go_To_Market · Series A Index Ventures and RTP co-led the Series A; the company had eight employees and under $20,000 of revenue. DD9
  8. 2013Go_To_Market · First landing Zendesk adopted infrastructure monitoring in 2013. DD1
  9. 2014Go_To_Market · First salesperson The first salesperson joined when the company had fewer than 30 people, to follow up inbound interest. DD19
  10. 2014-02Product · Cloud coverage The service worked with AWS, HP Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenShift and OpenStack. DD24
  11. 2014-02Go_To_Market · Trial and price A 14-day free trial, pricing from $15 per monitored host a month and hourly pricing for non-persistent hosts. DD24
  12. 2014-02Go_To_Market · Series B OpenView led a $15 million Series B; Dev Ittycheria joined the board; funds went to sales and marketing teams in New York and Boston. DD24
  13. 2015-01Product · Container support The service monitored AWS, Azure and Google Compute Engine and supported Docker and CoreOS. DD26
  14. 2016Go_To_Market · Enterprise sales An enterprise sales force for companies of about 5,000 employees started around 2016; adoption stayed bottom-up. DD19
  15. 2017-02Product · APM Application performance monitoring became generally available, with tag-based aggregation alongside infrastructure data. DD23
  16. 2017-02Go_To_Market · Bundle price Datadog Enterprise priced infrastructure and APM together from $23 per host a month. DD23
  17. 2017-09Product · Logs acquisition Datadog acquired Logmatic.io to add log processing and analytics; its team joined. DD22
  18. 2018Product · Log management Log management launched in 2018, combining metrics, traces and logs. DD1
  19. 2018Go_To_Market · Contracts For a long time Datadog sold only month-to-month contracts, not yearly deals. DD20
  20. 2019Product · Further products User experience monitoring launched and network performance monitoring was announced in 2019. DD1
  21. 2019-06Product · Integrations More than 350 out-of-the-box integrations supported self-service installation without professional services. DD1
  22. 2019-06Go_To_Market · Sales model A self-service tier, a high-velocity inside sales team and an enterprise sales force served about 8,800 customers. DD1
  23. 2019-06Go_To_Market · Expansion Dollar-based net retention was 146 percent; about 40 percent of customers used more than one product. DD1
  24. 2020-01Product · Data model Collectors (agents, libraries, APIs) are open source, and one data model ties every data type together through tags. DD19
  25. 2020-01Go_To_Market · Free tier A free tier under five servers and a free trial, but no freemium plan; the trial onboards all customers. DD19
  26. 2022Go_To_Market · Existing customers About 75 percent of the 2022 revenue increase came from existing customers. DD18
  27. 2023-03Product · Reliability A March 2023 outage affected all services across multiple regions. DD3
  28. 2023-08Go_To_Market · Optimization Management reported customers optimizing usage as growth slowed in 2023. DD17
  29. 2025Go_To_Market · Scale Revenue of $3.43 billion and 603 customers above $1 million ARR in 2025. DD2