Datadog announced its 2026 Ambassadors cohort and introduced Datadog Champions, establishing two recognition tracks to broaden how practitioners who publish, teach, and provide product feedback are recognized worldwide.
Datadog named its 2026 Ambassadors cohort and launched Datadog Champions, a new program designed to recognize a broader range of community practitioners. The change formalizes separate pathways for contributors who publish, teach, or shape product feedback after the Ambassadors program — which began in 2023 — expanded. This split matters because it creates more routes for technical practitioners to influence product direction and peer learning across regions and specialties.
The 2026 Ambassadors cohort covers a wide technical spectrum: cloud security and SIEM specialists, site reliability engineers (SREs), platform engineers, DevOps leaders, and contributors focused on AI observability and LLM monitoring. Datadog describes the group as its most geographically diverse and technically broad cohort yet, noting community builders who have organized user groups from São Paulo to Fukuoka to Lisbon. Individual profiles and event histories for the Ambassadors are available at datadoghq.com/ambassadors/.
Datadog highlighted specific Ambassador activities from the past year as examples of the program’s impact. Ashley Parks spoke at Datadog Live Dallas about Toyota Connected’s use of Datadog AI tooling. Ichiro Kano ran four user-group meetups in Japan that collectively drew more than 300 attendees and over 25 speakers. Alvaro Abreu co-organized São Paulo meetups with attendance exceeding 150. Marcel Drechsler led events in Berlin, including a Google Cloud and Datadog SRE workshop. Logan Rohloff contributed heavily in public Slack channels, exchanging nearly a thousand messages to troubleshoot and share practical knowledge.
Champions is presented as a complementary track to capture contributors who influence peers and product outside the deeper Ambassadors framework. The inaugural 2026 Champions cohort comprises 25 practitioners across 11 countries, with selection criteria emphasizing community impact, publishing and teaching activity, and the development of a technical voice. By institutionalizing two tracks, Datadog aims to recognize both program — engaged Ambassadors and broader grassroots contributors under the Champions label.
Examples cited for Champions underscore direct implications for builders and product feedback loops. One Champion runs the infrastructure behind PyPI, a dependency for nearly every Python project. Another spent months collecting feedback on Datadog Cloud Cost Management and brought that feedback to Datadog’s Paris office, where it informed product discussions. A third ran experiments at Brazil’s largest bank that evolved into a Udemy course. A Seoul — based Champion has run Datadog certification study groups for three years, helping more than 300 engineers prepare for certification.
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