Datadog

Primary moat is switching costs created by deep instrumentation, alerting, dashboards, SLOs, runbooks, tagging and pipelines across many teams. The platform breadth and now roughly 1,000 integrations raise replacement complexity and enable cross-sell, while brand and partner reach reinforce position.

There is no pure network effect, and cost advantage is modest given third-party cloud input costs. Competitive threats include hyperscaler-native tools, focused peers, and open source LGTM stacks that can undercut price at scale.

Datadog’s rapid product cadence in observability, cloud security and AI agents helps sustain the moat, but price pressure and open standards like OpenTelemetry can reduce lock-in over time.