Datadog, Inc. (DDOG)

The product is sold on consumption: the bill depends on how many hosts are monitored, how much log volume is ingested and how many events are collected. It grows with the customer's infrastructure, so revenue amplifies both growth and cost-cutting — in a hard year the first thing trimmed is log retention.

The platform's strength is breadth: dozens of modules from application monitoring to security, each sold to an already-connected customer at no acquisition cost. The share of customers using four or more modules is the metric by which growth quality is judged.

Competition comes from cloud operators with built-in monitoring and from open-source tools that cost less but require a team of your own. Datadog's argument is engineers' time, not price. The company pays no dividend.