Datadog announced on Wednesday the acquisition of Metaplane, a start-up specializing in AI-driven data observability. The company aims to accelerate its expansion in data observability, building on previous product launches. Metaplane will continue to support existing and new customers under the name “Metaplane by Datadog.”
Founded in 2019, Metaplane has developed into a platform that helps organizations monitor their data and detect problems early on. It has already gained several users, including Bose, the Linux Foundation, and Sotheby’s, among its customer base.
Growing need for data observability
“Observability is no longer just for developers and IT teams; it’s now an essential part of data teams’ day-to-day responsibilities as they manage increasingly complex and business-critical workflows,” Datadog VP Michael Whetten said. “This complexity will become even more pronounced as more businesses deploy AI applications. By unifying observability across applications and data, Datadog will help organizations build reliable AI systems.”
Metaplane uses AI models for anomaly detection that are primarily trained on historical metadata. The system attempts to determine the origin of data in a data warehouse and alert users to problems via tools such as Slack and PagerDuty. Users can mark changes as expected, allowing the system to learn over time. This prevents an overload of alerts.
Second acquisition this year
This acquisition is the second for Datadog in 2025. In January, the company acquired Quickwit, an open-source, cloud-native search engine for logs. Prior to the acquisition, Metaplane raised approximately $22.2 million in investments from parties such as Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, and Flybridge Capital Partners. Datadog also eyed GitLab last year, but that deal fell through.
“Our mission at Metaplane is to help companies ensure trust in the data that powers their business,” co-founder Kevin Hu said “Joining forces with Datadog enables us to bring data observability to tens of thousands more companies, while bringing data teams and software teams closer together.”
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