Key Highlights

● Datadog will report third quarter results before the market opens on Wednesday, November 4.

● Second quarter revenue was about $1.12 billion, up roughly 36% from a year earlier.

● Third quarter guidance calls for revenue of $1.14 billion to $1.15 billion.

● Datadog reported about 4,720 customers with annual recurring revenue of $100,000 or more.

Datadog (NASDAQ:DDOG), the cloud monitoring and security software company, is moving toward one of the busier stretches on its calendar. On October 14 the company said it will release third quarter fiscal year results before the U.S. market opens on Wednesday, November 4, and will discuss them on a call at 8 a.m. Eastern time. The date is now fixed.

The run-up has not been quiet. Product coverage from the company's DASH conference kept circulating, and press reports about a possible acquisition of the Israeli cloud security startup Upwind drew attention. The company has not confirmed any deal, and reported terms have differed from outlet to outlet.

When Exactly Will Datadog Report, and What Has the Company Confirmed?

According to the announcement released on the afternoon of October 14, Datadog will publish its third quarter fiscal year results before the U.S. financial markets open on Wednesday, November 4. A conference call to discuss results and guidance is scheduled for 8 a.m. Eastern time, with registration details and a live webcast available through the company's website. A replay is archived there afterward.

The company described itself in the notice as an artificial intelligence powered observability and security platform covering applications, infrastructure, data, models and security. That wording matters because it reflects how management now frames the business. Observability, the practice of monitoring how software systems behave, started as a tool for engineers watching servers and has widened to cover security checks, cost tracking and, increasingly, the behavior of software agents built on large language models.

Datadog reports on a calendar that tends to land early in the season for infrastructure software, so its numbers are often read as an early signal for the group. Nothing in the announcement itself discloses results, guidance changes or any transaction.

How Did the Datadog Second Quarter Set the Bar for the Third?

The reference point for the coming report is the second quarter, which Datadog released on August 6. According to the company, revenue was about $1.12 billion, up roughly 36% from the same quarter a year earlier. That pace is notable for a company of this size, and it was the figure that framed the guidance now in force.

Customer metrics moved in the same direction. The company reported about 4,720 customers with annual recurring revenue of $100,000 or more, up roughly 23% from a year earlier. Larger customers are the group that tends to adopt more products and expand usage over time, so growth in that cohort is one of the measures Datadog management highlights when discussing the durability of demand.

Cash generation was also solid in the quarter. Free cash flow was about $279 million, a margin of roughly 25%, and operating cash flow was about $316 million. The company ended June with about $5 billion in cash and marketable securities. On a generally accepted accounting basis, operating earnings were only slightly above break-even, a reminder that stock-based compensation and other items widen the gap between the reported and adjusted figures, and that the adjusted framing is the one management emphasizes.

What Does the Datadog Guidance Imply for the Quarter Now Being Reported?

Alongside the second quarter results, Datadog guided third quarter revenue to a range of about $1.14 billion to $1.15 billion. Non-GAAP operating earnings were guided to roughly $260 million to $270 million, and non-GAAP earnings per share to between about 63 and 65 cents. These are management expectations, not results, and the company has historically framed guidance conservatively relative to what it later reports, although that pattern is not a guarantee.

For the full year, the company guided revenue to between about $4.45 billion and $4.47 billion, non-GAAP operating earnings to about $1.01 billion to $1.03 billion, and non-GAAP earnings per share to between about $2.50 and $2.54. Taken together, the quarterly and annual ranges outline the sequential growth that management believed it could deliver, and they are the yardsticks against which the November report will be measured.

One detail worth noting is how modest the sequential step in the third quarter guidance looks next to the year-over-year growth rate. Sequential comparisons in usage-based software can be affected by the number of billing days, the timing of large customer commitments and seasonal patterns in cloud consumption, so the shape of guidance does not by itself reveal whether momentum is building or fading. Participants typically listen for commentary on usage trends in the first weeks of the new quarter, which management often offers on the call.

What Did Datadog Unveil at DASH That Bears on Agent Monitoring?

On June 9, at its annual DASH conference, Datadog announced more than 100 new capabilities, according to its release. Several centered on software agents, the autonomous programs that large language models can now power. Bits AI, the company's assistant, was described as able to detect, diagnose and fix issues on its own within preset guardrails, following code changes from staging through production and working inside tools such as Slack.

Other announcements addressed oversight. AI Guard was described as a security feature that watches agent behavior across multiple steps to detect and block attacks, including hidden malicious instructions embedded in content an agent reads. Agent Console was described as a central view of agents and coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor and GitHub Copilot, including usage and spending. Bits Agent Builder lets teams create custom agents inside Datadog to automate remediation and operational chores.

A fifth item, the customer-hosted cloud option, deploys the Datadog platform in a customer's own environment so logs are processed and indexed in the customer's cloud object storage. That addresses data residency and cost concerns that have pushed some large organizations toward self-managed tooling. Product announcements are not revenue, and the company will need to show in coming quarters how quickly customers adopt them, but they indicate where management is directing engineering effort.

What Are the Reports About Datadog and the Upwind Security Startup?

Press reports in recent days said Datadog was in talks to acquire Upwind, an Israeli cloud security company. Coverage cited a figure of about $1 billion in some outlets, while at least one commentary piece described a far larger bid and disputed the pricing logic. Datadog has not confirmed talks, terms or a timeline, and such reports can change or fall away.

If a deal were to materialize, it would extend Datadog's push into security, a segment where it competes with established cybersecurity vendors as well as cloud providers' own tools. Cloud security posture and runtime protection overlap with the monitoring data Datadog already collects, which is the commercial logic usually cited for combining the two. Execution, however, is the harder part: integrating a young company, retaining engineers and expanding into existing accounts all take time.

For the November report, the relevant questions are narrower. Management may be asked whether it can comment on the reports, how it thinks about capital deployment given roughly $5 billion in cash and securities at the end of June, and whether any transaction would be reflected in guidance. Companies often decline to discuss pending deals, so the absence of detail would not in itself be informative.

How Does Datadog Compare With Other Observability and Cloud Names?

Datadog sits in a crowded field that includes large cloud platforms offering built-in monitoring, long-established observability vendors and open-source tools that engineering teams can run themselves. The company's approach has been to offer a single platform with many modules, so that a customer starting with infrastructure monitoring can add log management, application tracing, security and, more recently, artificial intelligence oversight without introducing a new vendor.

That strategy raises a question that comes up each earnings season: whether growth is broad or concentrated. Datadog counts many thousands of customers, but a meaningful portion of recent usage growth has been tied to firms building artificial intelligence products, and those customers can scale usage up or down quickly. The company has said in the past that it monitors such concentration, and the third quarter report should add a new data point on how much of the growth comes from that group versus the wider base.

Competitive pricing is another thread. Customers that watch observability bills closely sometimes negotiate commitments or shift lower-value data to cheaper storage, which can slow usage growth even while the customer count rises. Datadog's customer-hosted deployment option can be read as a response to that dynamic, although how much it helps retention remains to be seen.

What Do the Datadog Margins and Cash Flow Say About Scale?

A defining feature of the second quarter was the combination of rapid growth with strong cash generation. A free cash flow margin around a quarter of revenue is high for a software company growing in the mid-30s range, and it gives management room to fund research, acquisitions or a share retirement program without raising debt. The company has not announced a change in how it uses cash.

Adjusted operating margin was roughly 23% in the quarter, while the generally accepted accounting figure was close to zero. The gap largely reflects stock-based compensation, which is a real cost to existing stock owners even when excluded from adjusted measures. Participants who focus on the generally accepted figure see a company that has only recently crossed into steady reported operating earnings, while those who follow the adjusted figure see a mature margin structure.

Looking at the guidance, adjusted operating earnings of roughly $260 million to $270 million in the third quarter would be broadly similar to the second quarter, indicating that management is not planning for a step up in margin in the near term. Hiring, cloud hosting costs and sales spending all influence that outcome, and the November call is the place where those assumptions typically get clarified.

What Uncertainties Surround Datadog Heading Into the Print?

Several uncertainties sit alongside the positive momentum. The first is expectations, since the second quarter growth rate of roughly 36% sets a high bar. The second is concentration among artificial intelligence native customers, whose spending can be lumpy. The third is the possible acquisition, which could change the cost base and the strategic narrative.

Finally, there is the question of disclosure. Datadog does not typically pre-announce. Until the report, the facts on record are the date, the second quarter results, the guidance and the product announcements. Everything else, including deal talks and customer-specific changes, remains unconfirmed by the company.

What Will Matter Most on the Datadog Call Itself?

The call at 8 a.m. Eastern time on November 4 will likely center on a handful of items. Revenue growth against the guided range is the obvious one, followed by the count of larger customers and net revenue retention, which indicates whether existing customers are expanding. Free cash flow and any update to full-year guidance will also draw attention.

Management commentary on agent monitoring is likely to be closely followed, given the DASH announcements. Specific adoption numbers, such as the count of customers using the new artificial intelligence modules, would help gauge whether product news is turning into usage. The company has sometimes shared such figures in prepared remarks, but it is not obligated to.

Participants will also listen for any remarks about the Upwind reports, about hiring plans and about the cadence of go-to-market spending. Whatever the tone, the results and guidance will be recorded in the company's release and in its quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.