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Datadog

Datadog – The Watchdog for the Cloud Services.

Cloud computing has opened new doors for new technologies and new ideas. The very technology is not quite old but has revolutionized the IT world. With the benefits, things also come with some serious problems, and in the case of cloud technology, it was data security. But since with a problem, there is always a solution, Datadog came into existence to solve the problem of data security for cloud services.

Datadog is an eleven-year-old company founded in 2010 in New York, and in just a decade, the company has gone global. The company provides services like monitoring of servers, databases, tools, and services, etc., for cloud-scale applications using a SaaS-based data analytics platform.

About the Datadog

Datadog, as its name suggests, helps companies secure the data on cloud services. The company provides its services in the field of finance, manufacturing, and logistics, healthcare, retail/e-commerce, the public sector, media & entertainment, technology, and gaming, etc. It works on technologies, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift.

The company ensures to take all the end-to-end traces, metrics, and logs under observation so that they can provide maximum security to the client’s application, infrastructure, and third-party services. The company not only helps the companies secure their cloud services but also helps them enhance the user experience for their clients. Cloud migration, monitoring consolidation, shift-left testing, security analysis, hybrid cloud monitoring, IoT monitoring, log analysis & correlation are some of the services provided by Datadog. The Datadog platform has been developed using a Go-based agent. It also uses technologies like D3, Apache Cassandra, Kafka, PostgreSQL, etc.

Datadog
Image source: zenduty.com

The Back Story

Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc founded Datadog in 2010 in New York. The two founders were colleagues at Wireless Generation and developed the idea of founding Datadog while working at the company. Wireless Generation was acquired by NewsCorp, and at the same time, the two realized that there was constant friction between the developer and the systems administration teams. This led to the idea of developing software to help the teams working at cross-purpose, and hence Datadog came into being.

The founders held a seed round in 2010, and companies like NYC Seed, Contour Venture Partners, IA Ventures, Jerry Neumann, and Alex Payne participated in the funding. The rising demand for cloud services helped Datadog to become popular in no time. It was a cloud infrastructure monitoring service that every company required for their cloud services. Soon the company was working with all the major cloud service platforms, i.e., AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, VMWare, and OpenStack. The company then started to expand by acquiring companies like Mortar Data, such that to enhance the capabilities of the Datadog platform. Datadog also established a research and development office in Paris in 2015.

The next year, Datadog announced the beta-release of Application Performance Monitoring. The platform provided full-stack monitoring for cloud platforms for the first time. In 2017, the company went on to acquire a Paris-based company named Logmatic. This acquisition added the service like querying and visualization of the logs to Datadog platform, such that it made easier for the platform to monitor and troubleshoot the online services. In 2019, a company named Madumbo partnered with Datadog adding its AI-based application testing platform to Datadog. The same year, Company also entered Japan by establishing a subsidiary company in the country.

On 19 September 2019, Company went public on Nasdaq and raised $648 million by selling 24 million of its shares. In 2016, according to Deloitte’s 2016 Fast 500 List, Datadog was among the top ten fastest-growing companies in North America.

The Founders

Oliver Pomel is one of the founders of Datadog, who is serving as the CEO of the company. He holds an MS degree in Computer Science from Ecole Centrale Paris. He is one of the original authors of the VLC media player. Pomel has also worked with companies like IBM as a software engineer. He developed the data systems for K-12 teachers as a VP at Wireless Generation.

The other founder of Datadog is Alexis Lê-Quôc, who also serves as the CTO of Datadog. He was an Ecole Centrale Paris alumni and earned a master’s degree in Computer Science. He worked at Wireless Generation as the Director of Operations for a few years. Before that, he has also worked at companies like IBM, ORange, and Neomeo.

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