DD was just easier to use for everybody, has lots of useful baked-in things we liked to use (apdex scores), and was intuitive enough that non-devs could design their own dashboards. We also found it way easier to collect metrics, traces, and other things.
FWIW none of these things are insurmountable and I suspect you'll eventually reach parity. Datadog lost our business for two reasons 1) Lack of billing transparency and 2) an incompetent account rep who managed to piss off our finance department while also embarrassing our CTO. And to be clear, while we aren't a "whale" our spend was over $6M/yr with Datadog - and the CTO along with the rest of eng leadership were all huge DD fanboys and yet they still managed to burn that bridge to the point where we'll never go back.
FWIW none of these things are insurmountable and I suspect you'll eventually reach parity. Datadog lost our business for two reasons 1) Lack of billing transparency and 2) an incompetent account rep who managed to piss off our finance department while also embarrassing our CTO. And to be clear, while we aren't a "whale" our spend was over $6M/yr with Datadog - and the CTO along with the rest of eng leadership were all huge DD fanboys and yet they still managed to burn that bridge to the point where we'll never go back.