Arielle Mella
Datadog Ambassadors share their expertise through blog posts, conference talks, open source contributions, and community leadership, helping developers around the world understand observability, DevOps, security, and more. From leading community events to building custom integrations, our Ambassadors have been hard at work showcasing their Datadog chops.
What we’ve been up to
Over the past year, our Ambassador community has continued to grow—not only in size, but also in impact. From publishing technical blog posts to giving conference talks and growing local communities, our Ambassadors have been at the forefront of thought leadership in the observability space.
Whether it’s community organizing or sharing real-world experiences on cloud migrations and platform engineering, our Ambassadors continue to produce thoughtful, hands-on content. Some standout contributions from this year include:
- In Connecting Rust Lambda Functions With OpenTelemetry and Datadog, Benjamen Pyle shares a practical guide to instrumenting Rust-based AWS Lambda functions with OpenTelemetry and exporting traces to Datadog.
- Divya Gupta Arora authored two blog posts sharing her takeaways and experience at DASH last year.
- Our Ambassadors are often delivering talks: Santiago Gomez Saez did a Datadog Live in Hamburg, Ichiro Kano talked at Datadog Summit Tokyo, and Ben Pyle and Mike Stemle spoke at DASH 2024.
Several Ambassadors have taken on leadership roles within their local communities, scaling User Groups into thriving hubs of learning and collaboration. From meetups to workshops, they’re helping foster strong regional ecosystems that support ongoing learning and connection.
- Ichiro Kano has played a key role in growing the Datadog Japan User Group (JDDUG) into a vibrant community, regularly organizing in-person meetups and technical sessions that bring together engineers across Japan to share observability best practices.
- Changhyeon Yoon has been instrumental in growing the Datadog Korea User Group (DDKruG), helping organize meetups that highlight real-world use cases, foster community-driven learning, and build a stronger network of Datadog users across Korea.
Meet the 2025 Datadog Ambassadors
This year, the Ambassador program is expanding with a new cohort of builders, security experts, educators, and community leaders—and we’re excited to welcome them to the community.
Kelly Bettendorf
Kelly is a Staff Security Engineer at Stavvy, focused on building practical, scalable security programs. His expertise spans detection engineering, cloud security, SIEM, and security automation—driving initiatives like detection as code, incident response, and compliance enablement. At DASH 2024, he shared a “crawl, walk, run” framework for detection as code, helping teams bring structure and scale to their detection efforts. A passionate problem solver and active member of the Datadog Slack community, Kelly brings high energy and curiosity to everything he does—whether it's architecting security solutions or diving into technical challenges in his home lab.
Rebecca Cottignies
Rebecca is a Cybersecurity Engineer at AssessFirst, where she leads efforts in governance, SOC, Purple Team operations, and ISO 27001 compliance. She’s particularly committed to cybersecurity governance and awareness-raising, with the passion of making this complex field accessible to everyone on her Medium blog. As a member of CESIN, she’s also passionate about sharing knowledge and disseminating best practices, contributing to the development of the cybersecurity community in France.
Shogo Hasunuma
Shogo Hasunuma is based in Japan and serves as the head of the Managed Service Provider (MSP) Section at iret, Inc. He joined the company in 2015 with no prior experience in IT engineering and has steadily built his career—from an entry-level monitoring operator to roles in infrastructure design and implementation—before being appointed as a team leader in 2019. Currently, he is committed to enhancing managed services by advancing incident response automation, adopting generative AI, and implementing comprehensive observability strategies centered around Datadog. He also supports end users in fostering autonomous DevOps practices by offering guidance on effective usage of Datadog.
YoungJin Jung
YoungJin is a DevOps Engineer driving infrastructure modernization at LG UPlus. He specializes in solving complex challenges that emerge in enterprise-scale environments, focusing on building scalable, resilient systems through modern DevOps practices. With a strong emphasis on observability and performance tuning, he utilizes Datadog to instrument services, analyze performance metrics, and proactively improve system reliability and the overall user experience. He is an active AWS Community Builder, contributing to the growth of cloud-native practices within the community, and also serves as a HashiCorp Ambassador, advocating for infrastructure as code and automation across large-scale deployments. You can read more about his DevOps adventures on his blog.
Yubin Kim
Yubin is a site reliability engineer at Karrot, focused on building resilient, scalable systems that internal developers can trust. She’s passionate about improving reliability through comprehensive monitoring, thoughtful CI/CD design, and pragmatic incident management. Yubin is a dedicated community member, always eager to share and learn alongside fellow engineers. She regularly publishes a number of blog posts on her personal blog on Datadog, Kubernetes, and observability events in Korea.
Michael Levan
Michael is a Kubernetes and platform engineering expert, author, consultant, and CNCF Ambassador. With a knack for turning complexity into clarity, he helps companies around the world level up their infrastructure—and regularly shares his expertise through blogs, books, courses, podcasts, and conference talks.
Jon Lindeheim
Jon is an Engineering Manager at Axis Communications, overseeing the core services team for Axis Cloud Connect. With a background in architecture and DevOps, he brings a strategic and technical lens to platform engineering. Jon has shared his insights at events like DASH 2024 and AWS Summits, covering topics like platform engineering, cloud transformation, and DevOps practices in real-world settings.
Logan Rohloff
Logan is a cloud and observability lead at RapDev, a Datadog Premier Partner. With experience spanning cloud automation, network engineering, and system administration, Logan plays a key role in helping organizations implement and optimize their observability strategies in the most automated and scalable fashion possible. He’s deployed nearly every Datadog product and written more than a dozen custom integrations. Logan also contributed to an open source utility for managing secrets with the Datadog Agent, which was donated to Datadog in 2024. Check out more of his work on RapDev’s blog.
Nilton Kazuyuki Ueda
Nilton is a Senior Data Executive in Business Intelligence, Data Engineering, Machine Learning and Generative AI at Deloitte, with over a decade of experience in multinational and global companies, leading large-scale corporate strategic initiatives. A longtime advocate of knowledge sharing, he actively contributes to the Brazilian tech community through technical talks, blog posts, and open discussions on cloud-native best practices.
You can check out the full list of Datadog Ambassadors and read more about the program here.
Thank you, Ambassadors!
The Datadog Ambassadors program continues to grow as a vibrant community of technical leaders, content creators, and practitioners who are shaping how teams around the world think about observability, reliability, and performance. We’re excited to see how this year's Ambassadors will continue to inspire others in the year ahead.
Want to be an Ambassador? Learn more about the program here.
