Claire Laurence
Senior Program Manager
DASH 2026 brought thousands of engineers, builders, security professionals, and technology leaders to New York City for 2½ days focused on building, operating, and securing modern systems.
Across hands-on sessions and more than 40 customer talks, teams shared how they’re tackling real-world challenges at scale with Datadog. On stage, the keynote set the direction for what’s next across observability, security, and AI, highlighting a shift toward more autonomous, AI-assisted operations.
Here’s a look at the key happenings from this year’s DASH.
Keynote
In the keynote, we introduced Datadog’s latest product updates that help you build, ship, and operate systems more quickly and reliably.
We continued our emphasis on using Bits AI to make the Datadog platform more powerful, announcing a number of AI-powered features. Among them were Bits Detection to autonomously monitor for degradations, Bits Remediation to fix issues, and Bits Database Optimization to intelligently find bottlenecks and improve performance.
We also introduced new features to help you monitor your AI workloads and agent use. You can use Datadog Agent Console to track how your teams are using coding agents, Patterns in Agent Observability to help you understand how your AI-powered apps are performing, and Bits Evals to improve your AI agent quality.
Beyond AI, we announced new features to support end-to-end observability across infrastructure and networking, code and data, and the user experience. Some highlights include Network Configuration Management and the ability to remediate network issues directly within Datadog, Journey Monitoring to view user behavior and technical performance from a single hub, and Cost Optimization Automation to close the gap between finding cost savings and implementing them.
Lastly, we announced additional ways that Datadog can help you keep your workloads and systems secure and compliant. AI Guard helps protect your agentic AI workloads, and Bits Threat Hunting autonomously surfaces risks and helps identify indicators of compromise.
These are just a handful of the over 170 new products and features that we released to help you reach autonomy across Dev, Ops, and Security. Check out our five-part DASH blog series to read more about all of the announcements.
Sessions
DASH had more than 100 technical sessions across breakouts, workshops, and expo theaters, and AI innovation was one of our core themes. We hosted industry leaders from OpenAI, Hugging Face, Anthropic, and Vercel in fireside chats with Datadog’s leadership team to discuss how AI is changing the ways that engineering and product teams work. We also heard in breakouts how customers such as Amex GBT, LayerX and Tapple, Versant Media, and Samsung are building and innovating with AI.
Additionally, Datadog’s core platform capabilities were a prominent topic across the sessions. SAS and Figma explained how they use Datadog’s Digital Experience Monitoring suite to understand user needs, Volkswagen Group shared how they are implementing Database Monitoring, and U.S. Bank highlighted how Datadog Observability Pipelines has improved their logging practices.
You can catch up on all of our breakout sessions, fireside chats, and panels on the Datadog YouTube Channel.
Hands-on learning remained a cornerstone of DASH this year, with 24 workshops offered throughout the event. We delivered sessions on some of our most popular products and topics, including Datadog Agent Observability, Datadog Core Skills for SREs, and Datadog Core Skills for Developers.
The expo theaters were among the busiest spots at DASH, with 29 sessions from Datadog Product Marketing and partners covering the full breadth of the platform. Topics included AI-powered threat detection and incident response, log management with AI pipelines, database optimization, cloud cost management, data reliability, and network observability. Each session lasted 20 minutes and was anchored in a specific use case with a live demo, giving attendees practical guidance to apply in their own environments.
Expo hall
The DASH expo hall featured booths and demos from our product and partner teams.
The Datadog Hub included 16 hands-on demo stations and 6 Ask the Experts stations, giving attendees a chance to see the platform in action. Demos spanned the full Datadog portfolio—from Bits AI and AI Observability to Infrastructure Monitoring and Log Management. In addition to the demos, we introduced a new session format: keynote AMAs. These sessions gave attendees the opportunity to dive deeper into DASH announcements and engage with the product and engineering teams that built the new features.
The Security Zone returned to DASH 2026 bigger than ever. Booth demos spanned SIEM, code-to-cloud security, and security of AI in production, while the DevOps Undercover Mission gave attendees a gamified way to explore the platform and enhance their security skills. For the first time, the Security Spotlight Theater had its own dedicated stage in the zone. The theater hosted 12 sessions covering product roadmap updates, customer testimonials, and stories from Datadog’s own security team.
Beyond the sessions and demo stations, DASH 2026 featured two interactive booth experiences. Race to Resolution was an esports-inspired incident response challenge where attendees stepped into a production incident, worked through the platform to find the root cause, and resolved the incident before time ran out. With a live leaderboard and head-to-head final, the competition was fierce. In Ask Bits, attendees teamed up with Datadog AI to tackle real-world challenges like investigating incidents, analyzing security signals, and debugging infrastructure.
Regional delegations
DASH 2026 had three delegations that offered region-specific content to customers who traveled from Japan, Korea, and Brazil. We also enhanced our localization this year by offering Certifications translated across five languages in addition to live translations and captioning for all breakout sessions and our keynote.
Women in Tech panel
We held a Women in Tech panel to discuss engineering with AI and the opportunities and challenges that AI can bring to women in the industry. Panelists recounted the assumptions they made about AI when it first came out and highlighted new bottlenecks that have crept up in their domains. They also discussed guardrails, observability, and what success looks like. The key takeaway was that regardless of how companies define and implement their AI strategies, it’s important that women stay in the forefront of the conversation.
DASH Partner Summit
We hosted the fifth annual DASH Partner Summit, welcoming our global partner ecosystem from over 30 countries to connect, collaborate, and explore new opportunities together.
Our executive leaders shared updates on Datadog Partner Network (DPN) growth, strategic priorities, and emerging opportunities across observability, security, and AI. Partners also joined breakout sessions, engaged with Datadog technical teams, and connected with peers.
Partner Summit concluded with the 2026 Datadog Partner of the Year Awards. Congratulations to this year’s winners:
DPN Partner of the Year – NAMER: RapDev
DPN Partner of the Year – LATAM: Appoena
DPN Partner of the Year – EMEA: DXHero
DPN Partner of the Year – APJ: MegazoneCloud
DPN Marketplace Partner of the Year: RapDev
DPN Rising Star Partner of the Year: NoBS.tech
Thank you to all of our partners who helped make DASH 2026 a success. If your organization is interested in joining the DPN, reach out to us for more information.
See you next year
DASH will be back in New York City at the Javits Center next year. Save the date for June 15–17, 2027. We can’t wait to see you there!
