Datadog sees observability becoming harder to achieve, not easier, as enterprises in Southeast Asia confront rising system complexity and a shortage of skilled talent.

Emilio Escobar, its Chief Information Security Officer, spoke with Frontier Enterprise during the Datadog DASH 2025 conference in New York City about best practices for tackling these challenges. Rob Thorne, Vice President for APJ, added perspective on how observability trends are playing out across the region.

Understanding the market

Escobar, who previously worked for Sony and Hulu, recalled how Datadog transformed observability — one of the reasons he joined the company.

“Datadog already had a reputation for building strong products. At Hulu, we were a media and content company, but the engineering group was proud of building things internally. We had our own in-house observability technology stack, but it wasn’t scaling and wasn’t working well. So we transitioned to Datadog. This was almost eight years ago,” he said.

At Datadog, Escobar’s team is responsible not only for safeguarding internal data but also that of its customers.

“We recognise that this is our customers’ data. We build the right guardrails to ensure it remains their data. Even in the product, when you look at our logs management platform, for example, there’s a concept of archiving the data back to the customer. We give them the tools to make sure they don’t send us data they don’t want to,” he explained.

With the arrival of AI, Datadog ensured customers remained in control of how their data is used.

“We wanted to make sure that we’re not training or using AI without our customers’ consent. We built a process for early adopters of our AI products to ensure they are actively onboarded, that they understand what it is, and what we do and don’t do with the data. We provide FAQs and share responsibility models so customers know what they’re accountable for, and what we’re accountable for. That hasn’t changed,” Escobar said.

Global observability trends

According to Escobar, many cloud-native start-ups initially follow the open-source route and try to build their own observability tools.

“Sooner or later, they realise they need an entire team to maintain it. Instead of burning countless engineering hours, they come to us. When Hulu decided to adopt Datadog, Datadog was still a very young company. You still see start-ups trying to do everything on their own before they realise how difficult it is,” he said.

Enterprises also face gaps in their supply chain. Vetting every supplier has become more complex given evolving security threats, data residency laws, and AI advancements. This often raises the question of whether to adopt early-stage products or more established ones.

“What I advise companies to do is create space for both: adopt early-stage products as well as mature, late-stage products. Otherwise, you’re not innovating. But you need a framework for how to do that internally,” Escobar noted.

At Datadog, his team uses a controlled environment for such evaluations.

“We test it with a subset of whatever data it needs access to. We don’t just onboard it and open it to the world. For an early-stage company, we meet with the founders to get a sense of their talent and how they think about securing customer data. It may not look like what a mature company has, but if the DNA is there, and they just need time, sometimes we work with them by giving advice on what that needs to be,” he said.

APAC focus

In Asia-Pacific, Datadog has doubled its customer base in Japan and South Korea within the past year, while also seeing significant opportunities in Indonesia, Thorne observed. 

“If there’s one country I think you should go to first and invest in, it’s Indonesia. They’ve got a very fast-growing economy, and they’re projected to be one of the biggest economies by 2050. The population is still growing, and there’s strong demand for observability and security,” he said.

Regardless of cloud maturity, organisations across the region are focused on customer experience.

“Whether they’re digital natives or a 100-year-old bank, they all want to differentiate their products or services through the outcomes they deliver to customers. The way they define that is through technology. Observability plays a major role in that,” Thorne said.

He added that organisations in the region are investing early in observability, embedding it from the software coding stage through to monitoring operations, user journeys, and customer experience.

In Southeast Asia, however, a shortage of skilled IT and security professionals complicates observability deployments. Escobar said Datadog’s platform approach helps reduce the burden on already stretched teams.

“It’s great to have a platform where observability data can provide security insights, and vice versa. Security can scale best, especially when talent is scarce, by enabling engineering teams to take on some of that security responsibility,” he said.

Untangling the mess

According to Thorne, one of the most common requests from customers, whether digital natives or legacy companies, is consolidation, moving away from a patchwork of disparate tools.

“Having one unified data platform that can quickly diagnose where a problem lies, without switching between five to 10 different systems, is becoming one of the biggest use cases we see, and it’s driving the market,” he said.

Escobar agreed: “Having a platform that is easy to use and onboard solves many of these problems.”

In the end, it’s not about embarking on grand initiatives all at once, but starting small and then scaling from there. 

“Find the most mission-critical use cases. Solve those first and start from there. Trying to boil the ocean is not always the best approach,” Thorne concluded.