What does Datadog do?
Datadog is monitoring software - developers use it to get operational visibility into their servers and applications.
Last updated: April 15, 2025
Datadog is monitoring software - developers use it to get operational visibility (what’s broken? What’s taking too long?) into their servers and applications.
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As applications and infrastructure have gotten more complex, developers need to know what’s going on under the hood so they can pre-empt and troubleshoot
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Datadog provides a product and series of SDKs (little code libraries) that let you instrument your application, record your metrics, and analyze them visually
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Generally, the Datadog platform has 4 major components: server monitoring, application monitoring, logs, and Other Stuff™
The New York based (surprisingly enough) company IPOd back in 2019, and in 2024 hit $2.68 billion in revenue, growing 26% year-over-year [1] From Datadog's most recent 10-K filing: We have grown rapidly in recent periods, with revenues for the fiscal years ended December 31, 2024, 2023 and 2022 of $2,684.3 million, $2,128.4 million, and $1,675.1 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 26% from the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023 to the fiscal year ended December 31, 2024 and 27% from the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022 to the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023.. So they're definitely onto something.
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The core Datadog product: observability
Every app that you use on the internet is running on a server somewhere. Developers need to understand what’s going on with their apps and servers so that things run smoothly: they’re checking for how fast things run, what errors they run into, spikes in traffic, and stuff like that.
Datadog is a godsend for DevOps teams (and before you’re large enough to have a DevOps team, regular full stack developers). It hooks up to your infrastructure (Docker, Kubernetes, plain Linux, etc.) and automatically pulls metrics like CPU and Disk usage. Here’s how the basic product works:
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Install Datadog on your servers (they call this the “agent”)
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Datadog collects your performance data and stores it
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You visualize and set alerts on that stored data as you please
Like most developer tools, the Datadog product is a combination of code libraries (SDKs) that you have to integrate with your application, as well as a web interface that you use for admin tasks, dashboarding, setting alerts, etc. Here’s what a basic Datadog dashboard might look like:
Servers, apps, and metrics
This is the first time we’re writing about monitoring and observability, so it’s worth taking a step back to understand (a) why developers need this visibility and all of these metrics , and (b) how we got ...