GitLab Customers Hope to Stay Out of the Doghouse if Acquired by Datadog

DevOps tools get even more consolidated. Enterprises are looking to reduce the number of vendors they're paying for DevOps tooling. By bringing together two powerful tools, a merger would offer users a more integrated and streamlined experience. The combination of GitLab's version control capabilities with Datadog's monitoring and analytics expertise, already popular among developers, perpetuates a movement towards solutions that cater to the end-to-end needs of development teams.

Monitoring and analytics get smarter. Datadog's core AIOps and observability strength lies in its monitoring and analytics capabilities, providing real-time insights into infrastructure, applications, and logs. Its targeting of the development community gives it a foothold in enterprises and can be a driver for this potential acquisition. Integrating GitLab with Datadog's monitoring tools would provide developers with a deeper understanding of runtime issues based on code changes and deployments that GitLab is intimately familiar with. This would enable them to identify and resolve issues more efficiently, possibly even automatically with little or no human intervention, leading to improved development and operational efficiency.

Runtime feedback is brought to the CI/CD pipeline. GitLab has been widely recognized for its robust CI/CD features, allowing developers to automate and accelerate their software development lifecycle. The potential acquisition by Datadog would allow automatic detection and creation of defects for day-two issues, leveraging monitoring and analytics data within their pipeline even further than today, as two separate companies. This would provide developers with valuable context, empower them to make data-driven decisions, reduce mean time to repair, and even proactively automate remediations.

If you're a Datadog user, don't expect many immediate changes. If you're also a Datadog contributor, expect a future move of the Datadog open-source projects to GitLab — you may need to make a few changes to your process, but GitLab has experts who will maintain history. Your PRs will soon be called merge requests.

If you're a GitLab user, look to GitLab for assurances of continuity of service. Reevaluate the value GitLab brings to your business, making sure it's the right fit — with or without Datadog. Where there's smoke, there could be fire; the acquisition as being reported in multiple outlets might not materialize, but that doesn't mean some of the reported rumors aren't true. Be prepared, regardless of vendor, for transactions like this to happen.