Yanbing Li
Chief Product Officer
Datadog has been named the Company to Beat for observability platforms in the August 2026 Gartner® AI Vendor Race research. Datadog has also been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Observability Platforms for the sixth consecutive year.
We believe that these recognitions reflect what we have been building toward for more than a decade: a single platform where teams can observe, secure, and act on everything that matters across their technology stack.
Our objective has not changed: Give teams the visibility and the means to act, and keep earning customer adoption of the next product rather than assuming it.
The questions have changed
As customers build and run AI-native applications, their systems are becoming more dynamic, more autonomous, and harder to reason about. Teams no longer ask only whether a service is up. They ask which agent made which decision, what it cost, what data it touched, and whether the output can be trusted.
Writing about the observability platform market as a whole, Gartner observes: “With critical visibility needed to maintain and enhance the availability, behavior and performance of technology resources, it’s no surprise that observability platforms are considered essential tooling for AI investments of all kinds.”
Being essential is not the same as being sufficient. Watching AI systems is table stakes now. The harder problem is doing something about what you see.
One platform, more than 40 products
Datadog’s unified observability and security platform breaks down organizational silos and enables IT operations, development, security, and business teams to collaborate more effectively and take action based on a single source of truth. With more than 40 integrated products, customers can replace multiple point solutions with a single platform and increasingly let intelligent agents do the investigative work for them:
Bits Investigation autonomously investigates alerts, surfaces root causes, and recommends and takes action across systems, accelerating incident response and reducing outages.
Agent Observability provides visibility into the performance, quality, security, and cost of AI agents and LLM apps, enabling safe and scalable adoption of AI-native workloads.
The Datadog MCP Server lets AI agents query Datadog directly, so the systems your teams build can reason over the same telemetry data your engineers do.
Observability Pipelines offers native OpenTelemetry support for open, vendor-neutral collection and gives teams granular control over how telemetry data is collected, routed, and retained, helping them manage data volumes and keep observability spend predictable as they scale.
BYOC Log Management lets customers keep log data in their own cloud account while querying it in Datadog, supporting data residency and cost requirements without fragmenting global operations.
At DASH 2026, we launched more than 100 new capabilities across observability, security, and AI-assisted operations. We also acquired Adaptive ML and announced a strategic partnership with Sakana AI, both aimed at advancing the research that will shape how teams operate AI systems at scale.
Where we are pushing next
No position in a market like this is permanent, and we would rather name the hard parts than wait to be asked about them.
Cost
Observability spend scales with the systems that are monitored, and AI workloads generate a lot of data. Observability Pipelines, BYOC Log Management, and Infinite Cardinality Metrics all exist because customers should be able to keep the dimensions they need without sampling their way out of a bill they cannot defend. We are not finished here.
Data residency and sovereignty
Regulatory requirements are fragmenting across countries, industries, and public-sector environments, and those requirements increasingly extend past logs into metrics, traces, and digital experience data. Customers need jurisdiction-specific control without splintering their global operations, and we are investing accordingly.
Governance you can act on
As teams grant real execution privileges to agents, the question shifts from what happened to what an agent is allowed to do, who approved it, and whether you can prove it. Approval gates, policy guardrails, and auditability are becoming product requirements rather than compliance paperwork.
The race continues
The teams that we serve are rebuilding how their software works, and what runs underneath them has to keep up.
Customer feedback is a core aspect of analyst evaluations. We’re grateful to the customers who continue to tell us plainly when we get it wrong. That has been the most reliable product input we have.
Gartner disclaimer:
Gartner, AI Vendor Race: Datadog Is the Company to Beat for Observability Platforms, Colin Fletcher, D.B. Cummings, Neil Young, 19 August 2026.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Observability Platforms, Padraig Byrne, Martin Caren, D.B. Cummings, Neil Young, 13 July 2026.
GARTNER and MAGIC QUADRANT are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
