Datadog, Thank You for Blocking Us

Summary

On December 15, 2025, the Deductive team received an unexpected email from Datadog notifying us that our account was under review. While it is always a little flattering to receive that level of attention from an industry incumbent, we initially assumed this would be resolved quickly through clarification. It did not immediately occur to us that a public company at Datadog’s scale could view a much smaller startup like Deductive as a potential competitive threat.Datadog access was revoked, and production telemetry stopped immediately‍We responded within minutes to clarify what appeared to be a misunderstanding. Deductive had been using Datadog’s APM platform since February 2025 strictly to instrument our own production systems with logs, metrics, traces, and application performance data, in exactly the same way most teams operating distributed systems at scale rely on telemetry. This usage had no relationship to Bits AI, which was first announced in 2023 and operates as a direct competitor to Deductive.Despite this clarification, our Datadog accounts and API keys were deactivated shortly thereafter. Telemetry ingestion stopped across all clusters almost immediately, and within minutes, we lost visibility into production systems that depend fundamentally on continuous observability signals to operate safely.A Single Point of Failure, or a Single Point of Opportunity?Given how deeply integrated Datadog was into our production environment, the initial instinct was to wait for a response and attempt to resolve the issue through support channels. This would have been the rational choice in a world where observability tooling carries high switching costs and deeply entrenched operational dependencies.That world no longer exists.When it became clear that access would not be restored in a timely manner, we treated the situation not as an outage, but as a forced experiment in the real cost of vendor lock-in under modern tooling assumptions. To understand why this moment felt...