Today, and thank you for standing by, welcome to the fourth quarter data dog earnings conference call. At this time, I'll participate in a listen only mode. After the speakers presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during this session, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone.
You will then hear an automated message advising you, your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today. You could bother us by the presence of the special relations. Please go ahead.
Thank you Catherine. Good morning and thank you for joining us to review data dogs fourth quarter in fiscal year 2022 financial results, which we announced in our press release issued this morning. Joining me on the call today are Olivier Plumel, data dogs co-founder and CEO and David Oaksler, data dogs CFO. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements, including statements related to our future financial performance, our outlook for the first quarter and fiscal year 2023 and related notes and assumptions, our gross margins and operating margins, our strategy, our product capabilities, and our ability to capitalize on market opportunities.
The words anticipate, believe continue, estimate, expect, intent, will, and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements or similar indications of future expectations. These statements reflect our views only as of today and our subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to defer materially. For a discussion of the material risks and other important factors that could affect our actual results, please refer to our form 10 to you for the quarter ended September 30, 2022.
Additional information will be made available in our upcoming form 10K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2022, and other filings with the SEC. This information is also available on the Invest Relations section of our website along with a replay of this call. We will also discuss non-gap financial measures which are reconciled to their most directly comfortable gap financial measures in the tables in our earnings release, which is available at investors.dg.gq.com. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to the VA.
Thanks, Yucca. And thank you all for joining us this morning. We had a solid queue for to end a strong fiscal year 2022. We did a very significant new innovations for our customers. We saw increasing adoption of our product, and we attracted thousands of new customers to our platform. Meanwhile, we delivered stronger venue growth, margins, non-gap operating profit, and we generated more than $350 million in free cash flow.
Let me start with a review of our Q4 financial performance. In Q4, revenue was $469 million, and increased of 44% year over year, 8% quarter over quarter, and above the high end of our guidance range. We had about 23,200 customers, up from about 18,800 last year. We ended the quarter with about 2780 customers with ARR of $100,000 or more, up from about 2010 last year. These customers generated about 85% of our ARR. And we had 317 customers with ARR of $1 million or more, compared to the 216 we had at the end of last year. We generated free cash flow of $96 million with a free cash flow margin of 21%. And our dollar-based net retention rate continued to be over 130% as customers increased their usage and adopted more products.
Our platform strategy continues to resonate in the market. As of the end of Q4, 81% of customers were using two or more products, up from 78% a year ago. 42% of customers were using four or more products, up from 33% a year ago, and 18% of our customers were using six or more products, up from 10% last year.
Now, moving on to these quarters business drivers. Overall, we observed slower usage growth with these existing customers while continuing to scale on new logo acquisition and new product across sales. Starting with usage, usage growth of existing customers in Q4 was overall slightly lower than what we observed in Q2 and Q3, which we attribute first to a continuation of cut-cost optimization by our larger spending customers. And second, to seasonal annual slowdown in the second half of December that was more pronounced in previous years. As in Q2 and Q3, we continued to see more optimization from customers with a larger cloud footprint while our smaller spending customers are exhibiting higher growth.
From a product perspective, we didn't see meaningful differences in a more major product as they all experienced flooded growth, albeit decelerating on the year-over-year basis. In contrast to this declaration usage course of existing customers, we continued to execute on new logo lands and multi-product adoption. And we also continued to see stable, very strong growth retention trends.
First, we had our strongest new logo quarter to date with a record level of new logo AR bookings. Second, our sales pipeline remained healthy as a pattern of new logo and cross-sales is scaling above the levels of the past years and we see demand growing along with our investments in go-to-market. I'd also like to point out that although we have made steady progress, we still see significant opportunities to grow open iteration and total spend amounts with larger customers. As of January 2023, 37% of the Fortune 500 are data-dog customers up from 30% last year. For these customers, the median data-dog AR is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars this leads a very large opportunity for us to go with these customers as they continue to move towards a cloud and modern day-lapse.
We are also pleased with the initial tech up of some of our newest products, including cloud cost management, for which we already added the mid-60s to commitment last month from a global fast-food chain. And finally, Churn has remained low with closer-venue retention steady in the mid to high-90s. We believe this higher-attention number is indicative of the business-criticality of data-dog for our customers.
Now, let's move on to R&D. During the quarter, we released our latest product to general availability, universal service monitoring, which detects all micro-services across an organization's environment and provides instant visibility into their health and dependencies, all without any code changes. Universal service monitoring, which is existing in fast-food monitoring and application performance monitoring capabilities, and enables end-to-end observability with minimal deployment friction.
Now, let's take a moment to review the R&D team's accomplishments in 2022. We ended the year with 17 generally available products, up from 13 at the end of 2021, and we greatly expanded the capabilities of our existing products. Overall, in 2022, we have meaningfully broadened our observability capabilities and pushed forward in making each product a separate grid. Meanwhile, we have made meaningful progress, but remain in early days in the new areas of Cloud Security and developer experience.
In observability, we continue to expand or end-to-end unified platform. We now have more than 600 integrations, including all the latest products on AWS, GCP, and Azure. We launch new AI capabilities, such as Word.logs and limited detection, to have customers separate signal from nodes in their log data, and Word.logs and analysis, to identify the root cause of issues, and quantify their impact on customers. We launch CloudCoff management, to have customers take control of their infrastructure costs. We announced service catalog, two managed service ownership at scale. We made observability pipelines generally available, enabling customers to collect and transform data from any source to any destination, or that's petabyte scale. We launch audit 12 to help customers achieve their compliance and governance goals. We extended sensitive data scanner, beyond logs, to inspect APM and RAM data flows, and we now collect data from SNMP traps, to provide greater visibility into physical network equipment.
In Cloud Security, we get building out of platform. We launch the Cloud Security Management, or reach context-aware CNAP platform. We launch application security management, building on our acquisition of SCREEN in 2021, and we announce the data of native protection, to block malicious actors directly within the data platform.
In developer experience, we are expanding on our CI visibility product. We introduce continuous testing to bring efficient and reliable testing within CI-CD pipelines, and we launch a data of intelligence test runners, which significantly reduces the time and cost of running tests. And last but not least, we deliver the number of platform-wide initiatives.
We achieve the FedRAMP moderate authorization, and have since landed a number of government agencies as customers. Our customers today can also use COSREEN for collaboration, incident response, per programming, and debugging, less than a year after the acquisition. And we continue to expand on the HIPAA and PCI compliance of our product.
As you can tell, we've been busy, and I want to thank the R&D team for a very productive year. Looking ahead to 2023, our teams are continuing to push forward, as beta products from 2022 include data streams monitoring, workflow automation, even correlation, hit maps, dynamic instrumentation, workload security profiling, resource catalog, and native protection, among others. We also continue to integrate our 2022 acquisitions, COSREEN HD-C-CREEN Cloud Graphed into the data of platform, and we are excited for their potential. In summary, we look forward to delivering many more capabilities to help our customers in 2023.
Now, let's move on to sales and marketing. Our go-to-market teams continue to execute very well into the end of 2022, in particular on new logo-lens. So let's go over a few of our wins this quarter. First, we sign a seven-seguer land with a Fortune 500 industrial group. This company was using multiple open source and built-in cloud monitoring tools, which led to relief delays and consumer-facing outages.
In addition to our metric, traces, and logs, this company will rely on our ability to integrate open telemetry data sources to deliver immediate value. This customer's initial deal includes 13 products across observability, security, and developer experience categories. Next, we sign a seven-seguer land with a Fortune 500 financial services company. This customer is moving hundreds of applications from on-prem to the cloud, and multiple legacy tools were creating gas and feasibility and post PCI compliance problems.
This customer today is looking at savings of roughly $1 million in the first year of using DataDog, an emitting full reduction in meantime to resolution. This deal will start within faster monitoring and replace three different disc-pred tools with plans to expand to other DataDog products in the future. Next, we sign a seven-seguer land deal with a major federal government agency. This agency was looking to reduce tools' role and aimed at a rapid rollout to hundreds of different programs, while setting money on engineering and issue resolution.
This agency is among a number of new government customers in 2022, following our federal moderate authorization. This deal is expected to display at least eight commercial legacy monitoring tools. Next, we sign a seven-seguer land deal with a leading Japanese system integrator. This company has been a very successful hardware system integrator, and is looking to grow its digital and cloud transformation business. This customer plans to add up 15 DataDog products in order to support its MbShoes growth plans. And last but not least, we sign a multi-million dollar expansion with one of the world leading insurance companies.
Prior to using DataDog, this company was using more than 30 tools across nine business units. By consulting it onto DataDog, the customer estimates it had changed roughly 115% ROI all within a year, while reducing average meantime to resolution from one and a half hours to 15 minutes. With this renewal, this company is adding database monitoring, cloud security management, and application security management, and is now using 12 DataDog products. That is for this quarter's customer highlights.
And again, I'd like to thank all go-to-market teams for their great execution Q4 and throughout 2022. Now, let me speak to our longer-term outlook and my thoughts on 2023. Although we are seeing customers be more cautious with their cloud user expansion in the near term, we see no change to the long-term trends towards digital transformation and cloud migration. We think it's healthy for customers to optimize, and we believe that the ability to correct course and continually align the nature and scale of their applications with their business needs is one of the key benefits of cloud transformation.
At DataDog, we have always organized our products and of business around helping customers gain agility and reduce costs. And we do it by enabling stronger business performance and efficient use of their engineering and infrastructure spend. Regardless of near-term mature pressure, we believe it is still early days, and we expect that companies worldwide will continue to grow than next year 90 footprint to deliver value to their customers. Given the large opportunities we've seen in front of us, we plan to keep building and innovating.
We have already made progress in observability, but we still have much to do to deliver more value and solve more problems for our customers. And we are excited about opportunities in cloud security, developer experience, as well as our early efforts in our areas around ITSM and World Time Business Intelligence. As we have since we founded DataDog, we are also balancing long-term investment against maintaining the discipline to ensure our continual financial performance. We recognize that the macro environment remains uncertain.
So while we continue to focus on scaling and investing, we are growing those investments in a discipline fashion in 2023, and David will discuss this in more detail. We remain confident in our long-term opportunities, and we are continuing to invest in austerity priorities to catch up them. With that, I will turn the call over to our CFO for a review of our financial performance and guidance.
David? Thanks, Olivier. In Q4, we continue to execute well and delivered value to our customers. Revenue was $469 million up 44% year-over-year, and up 8% quarter-over-quarter. To dive into some of the drivers of our Q4 performance, first, we saw existing customer usage growth in October and November at a similar level to what we saw in Q2 and Q3. In the month of December, we saw a slower growth dynamic. As the typical slowdown we see at the end of December was more pronounced than in previous years. As a result, the growth rate in usage by existing customers was lower in Q4 than in Q2 and Q3. Next, similar to Q2 and Q3, we saw larger spending customers grow slower than smaller spending customers. As with Q2 and Q3, we saw relatively more deceleration in the consumer discretionary vertical particularly in e-commerce and food delivery. Geographically, we saw solid and relatively similar growth across all regions.
As Olivier discussed, we experienced strong new logo ARR growth and low-chirn again in this quarter. We had a record level of new logo bookings in the quarter across customer sizes. Our dollar net based net retention remained a strong level above 130% for the 22nd consecutive quarter. And gross revenue retention has remained unchanged over the last several quarters and remained steady in the mid to high 90s. We believe this high and steady gross retention points to the mission critical nature of the data.com platform for our customers.
Now moving on to our financial results. Billings in the quarter were $536 million, up 31% year-over-year. Billings duration was slightly lower year-over-year. Remaining performance obligations or RPO was $1.06 billion, up 30% year-over-year. An RPO duration declined on a year-over-year basis. And we note that current RPO growth was in the high 30s year-over-year. We continue to believe revenue is a better indication of our business trends than Billings and RPO as those can fluctuate relative to revenue based on the timing of invoicing and the duration of customer contracts.
Now let's review some of the key income statement results. Unless otherwise noted, all metrics are non-gap. We have provided a reconciliation of gap to non-gap financials in our earnings release. Gross profit in the quarter was $378 million, representing a gross margin of 81%. This compares to a gross margin of 80% last quarter and also 80% in the year-go quarter. We continue to experience efficiencies in cloud costs reflected in our cost of goods sold in this quarter. In the mid to long term, we continue to expect gross margin to be in the high 70s range. Our Q4 non-gap up-ex grew 54% year-over-year and we continue to grow our headcount in R&D and go to market.
Q4 operating income was $83 million or an 18% operating margin compared to an operating income of 71 million or a 22% operating margin in the year-go quarter. As a reminder, the year-go operating margin benefited from lack of in-person office, travel and event costs due to our COVID policies during the pandemic. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow statements, we ended the quarter with $1.9 billion in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash and marketable securities. Cash flow from operations was $114 million in the quarter and after taking into consideration capital expenditures and capitalized software, free cash flow was $96 million for a free cash flow margin of 21%.
Now for our outlook for the first quarter and the fiscal year 2023. Informing our guidance, we continue to use conservative assumptions as to the organic growth of our customers compared to historical periods. And as usual, we are basing our near-term guidance on recent activity we see with our customers. We are incorporating an expectation for seasonally weaker growth in the first quarter due to the subdued growth in the month of December that creates a lower growth trajectory to start the first quarter. While our customers are continuing to expand with us, we are assuming in our guidance that cloud optimization continues to affect our expansion rate in 2023.
For the first quarter, we expect revenue to be in the range of $466 to $470 million, which represents a 28 to 29% year-over-year growth. Non-GAP operating income is expected to be in the range of $68 to $72 million or an operating margin of 15%. Non-GAP net income per share is expected to be in the range of 22 to 24 cents per share based on approximately 348 million weighted average to looted shares outstanding.
For the full fiscal year 2023, we expect revenue to be in the range of $2.07 to $2.09 billion, which represents a 24 to 25% year-over-year growth. Non-GAP operating income is expected to be in the range of $300 to $320 million for a margin of 15% at the midpoint. Non-GAP net income per share is expected to be in the range of $1.02 to $1.09 per share based on approximately 351 million weighted average to looted shares outstanding.
Now some additional notes on the guidance. First, regarding our fiscal year 2023 investments, we continue to balance near-term financial strength with investment in our large long-term opportunities. Our non-GAP operating income guidance reflects this discipline. We will continue to grow our R&D and go to market teams as we broaden our platform in service of our customer needs, albeit at a slower pace than in previous years. As a result, we are planning to grow our operating expenses, including COGS, in the fiscal year 2023, in the low 30% range year-over-year. We plan to grow our headcount in fiscal year 2023 in the mid-20% range year-over-year. This compares to fiscal 2022 headcount growth of approximately 50% year-over-year.
Next, as interest rates have risen, our interest income has increased and become more meaningful. We expect net interest and other income for the fiscal year 2023 to be approximately $75 million. We expect tax expense in fiscal year 2023 to be $11 to $13 million. Finally, we expect capital expenditures and capitalized software together to be in the range of 4 to 5% of revenues in fiscal year 2023.
To reiterate Olivier's comments, we see no change to our long-term opportunities as our customers embark and expand on their cloud migration and digital transformation plans. We remain strongly positioned to help our existing and prospective customers with these journeys. I want to thank Data Dogs Worldwide for their efforts in 2022, and I'm excited about our plans for the next year.
With that, we will open the call for questions, Operator. Let's begin the Q&A. Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question, you'll need to press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, press star 11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster.
Our first question comes from Mark Murphy with JP Morgan. Your line is open. Thank you very much. Olivier, I was wondering if you can comment on the AWS infrastructure monitoring portion of the business specifically. Do you see that trending above or below the 25% rate of the total businesses year? I'm wondering if you perhaps see some of the other hyperscanners, Azure, Google, etc., gaining any share of that mix during this year is an advocate follow-up.
Yes, so, look, we obviously we see we get data from our customers using those cloud providers. We also listen to the commentary that cloud providers provide on the Internet of their own growth. There's not a one-to-one mapping between what happens on the revenue side for the cloud providers and what we see on the infrastructure side on our end. But we are seeing some of the same trend, you know, where their growth slowed down through a Q4. And we've been listening to their comments when they get guidance forward that what might look like in the near future, which also informed our guidance. In terms of the mixed shift, you know, we don't see anything that differs from the trends we saw throughout the last year. I think the story there is they also seeing optimization from some of their customers that needs a larger customer. And on our end, we expect that optimization to continue throughout the year. That's what we built into on guidance.
Okay, understood. And then David, I believe you mentioned record new logo ARR bookings in the quarter. We're great to hear. I think we're wondering, you know, what you attribute that to just given the environment is so challenging and it you there was mentioned of several of these companies landing with eight or 10 or 15 data docs products and replacing legacy tools or replacing open source. Do you see an increase in those kinds of consolidation opportunities and maybe just a broadening where this landscape is viewing data dog as the converged observability leader and wanting to consolidate into that direction.
Yeah, and Q4 and I think going forward, we continue to see greenfield and new projects, new workloads being the majority of the driver, but has seen over the quarters and we talked about some of them in our prepare remarks, consolidation opportunities. When a client is already in their cloud journey and has workloads and is looking to get a platform, create efficiencies, et cetera, they have increasingly been consolidated on data dog and we see continued opportunities for that. Yeah, to that, you know, we see the men scaling basically like we're still early in cloud migration and digital transformation. And we see no slow down from companies going from legacy to this new world. That's why we get more and more new rules and more volume there. The part of business we see going slower is the larger customers that are further along in this cut transformation, they have a lot of workload trying to optimize because that's where they can meaningful this air cost.
Thank you very much. Thank you. One moment for our next question. We have a question from Syjint seeing from Morgan Stanley, your line is open.
非常感谢,谢谢。稍等,我们接下来的问题来自摩根士丹利的Syjint,请您发言。
Yeah, thank you for taking the question. I want to talk to ask about the product innovation and in some sense, you guys have had a pretty impeccable track record of leasing a lot of product that sort of benefited your customers over the last couple of years. Given sort of the environment that exists today, do you feel that in some sense data dog gets viewed by customers as sort of the, you know, a Lamborghini type observability solution, I'm meaning that are you. Customers may not need all of the bells and whistles that a 17 product folio can provide any thoughts there on whether data dog may be potentially over engineered for in terms of customers, willing to spend in the current environment.
So I definitely don't think we position on self as the Lamborghini, you know, we are not the Lamborghini doesn't have a glove box and needs to go to the shop every two weeks, that's definitely not. What we have been investing heavily in in product innovation, we have a lot of products today that thanks to this acceleration of product innovation over the past few years are early in their life cycle. So what we've seen in the current environment is that it is actually helping us get to this consolidation deal that we're mentioning a little bit earlier because we can cover more of what our customers need to do and drive more efficiencies. Again, you see early in that because many of those products early in their life cycle, so they might not be applicable to every single type of customer in every single type of situation. But I think this is validating or destination there, you know, and it shows we need we need to do more of that, not less.
And I'm aware larger customers are very, very careful about their spend. It might be more difficult for some of those products to get a lot of adoption with any particular customer at the very high level of spend. So we're focusing today on getting a maximum number of those customers to adopt those products and plan the seeds of future growth as they further consolidate and move to the ground. And just to follow up on those larger customers who are seeing who are seeing their uses trends slow more than smaller customers relative to the commitment. How are you guys sort of handling that? Are you in a situation where you're rolling over credits or you sort of enforce things sort of the take or pay aspect of the contract any color there on how you're working with those larger customers in terms of where they stand relative to their commitment?
So we always want to partner with customers and build a long term relationship with them. We've had some customers that have run into very significant business headwinds where their own businesses have contract quite a bit. And in those situations we always work with them to a structure the contracts and make sure we get to a better outcome. We've done that. We've run of all major customers over the past quarter. And you know we we've had some commission with some of our customers as well. So that's part of the what we use customers also part of the again is we're getting for the year. And I just want to add that because we tend as you know land to go land and expand and our customers tend to under commit relative to what they eventually get to. We haven't seen across the customer base a very meaningful increase of sort of unused commitments. And so and so that's something about our you know our go to market that creates flexibility with clients to commit as they see usage.
Great. Thanks very much. Just one real quick one David. I know you I know Billings isn't necessarily the best metric to sort of focus on but one cues are really monstrous comp. So maybe any color you can provide as we should think about billing especially which changes in duration and calendar 23 and maybe lower commits up from customers on renewal. Yeah I think again I think it is really driven by the the ARR and you know linearity of that. So you know I don't think we plan for Billings etc. We essentially have had Billings as you know go above and below the revenue based on the you know the billing in that period. And so we don't see you know really any change in that type of pattern but again bring everyone back to ARR revenues as the major economic driver.
That's great. And then I'll you real quickly. If you look back at your business historically there's been a fairly tight linkage between your growth rate and the hyper scalers with a multiple on it. So we sort of look forward what types of things need to happen to expand that that multiplier. Thanks. Well I mean look we're we're covering more and more of the we're starting a bigger problem for customers which means we're expanding all time. And so we can have a larger and larger multiplayer over time. That's why we were investing in new categories as well as building up observability.
And so we're going to be doing all these investments. So that's that's where we're going. I think you arrived though that the underlying wave. That is has been a tailwinds whether it's your company with cloud migration and digital transformation. I think that with my dear bit more of a headwind of all the next two quarters. But we we strongly believe that it will become a tailwind again in the future. We just gone tell can tell you when exactly. The we've listened to the call of the hyper Seattle they can tell you when either we're in the same boat there. So what we're doing today is we're focusing on the drivers of future success which are covering more of the customer landscape. You know so getting into more new logos, more geographies, more segments. And also developing all products and getting those parts adopted by more of these customers which is how we're going to have. I'm sure it's in growth in the future.
Perfect. Thanks very much. Thank you. Our next question comes from Fred Lee with Credit Suisse. Your line is open. Good morning. Thank you for taking my question. I'm curious about you know product expansion and what will help data dog gain share as a percent of hyper scale spend a little bit related to Brad's question. I'm going to give you a minute ago. I wonder if we can get nothing in which products are gaining the most traction and have the greatest potential in 2023.
Well so we have a lot of products that are early in their life cycle. Some of them are large categories where we are seeing larger and larger revenue and and we have very ambitious plans. So I think it's really going to be a mix. We see some interesting early signs with cloud cost management, you know which is still only built to a handful of customers at this point. But already seeing very large commitments from some risk customers we call that on the call. So we think it might be you know if you think of anything that might have more of an impact in the short to me time that might be one of those. But really the way we think about all those products is how do we turn them all into major products you know two three four years out.
How do we win these additional categories and how do we become the platform of choice for consolidation in the long term that we're driving towards. And just a quick follow up on the security portion. So with regard to the uptake of your security solutions, how would that compare how does that compare to the adoption patterns of in front of an APM. Well it's a bit difficult to compare to to in a friday because it was the very first thing we did in the early days of the company. We it's actually pretty comparable to what we've seen with APM, you know where it's the main with a lot of investment required.
We also have a very ambitious and very differentiated approach to it in which requires quite a bit of a build out and quite a few things to figure out with customers. But we also see continuous adoption growth thousands of customers in the platform we see it being adopted at the very large scale by very large customers in which some of which we call we also mentioned the call today. So we're we're not completely there yet. There's still a lot of work to do but we think it's tracking well to respect to what we can expect in our plan. Great. Thank you very much.
Great. Good morning everyone. So thank you for taking the questions. I want to ask you about the usage patterns of large customers versus small customers. I know you said you're the smaller customers. We're not seeing as much of a slow down and usage on but what gives you confidence that those smaller customers just haven't reached or reacted. You know to the to the slowing macro yet and we may see maybe a slow down in that segment going forward.
Well, it's hard to tell what was going to happen in the future right so we don't really have a crystal bowl there. What we see though is that customers save money where it matters which tends to be the very large line items which focus on the service how long into the cloud is going to be first. They're called providers bills that are again one or two orders of manager larger than their ability bills and then what's going to be affected by that and maybe with some of the decisions more specific to ability as well. So that's what we see there.
That's why we see mostly the large customers do that on the smaller side as pointed out that many of our smaller customers are actually very large companies that just are fairly new into the cloud and are still growing into the cloud. So they are seeing exactly the same thing as the the appears who are spending a lot more on us. It's just the part of their business that is where the spend is growing as opposed to where the spend is today and needs to be control. The last thing I will say is on the very low end of our customer base we do see impact of the macro environment. We have a bit more turn at the very very low end which is in the what you see where you see our customer count not going up as much. Despite us having very strong new local quarters that's more focused at the very very low end of the customer base and is not moving the numbers at all in terms of a growth retention which remains very high.
Okay, that's great. Thank you for the color there. I was also wondering if your your gross margin was surprisingly strong in the quarter of one ring if there's anything you can do on pricing. Given you know these large customers focus on cost optimization.
So we work with the last customers you know the obviously to make sure that they take it differently they need. You know we we optimize in gross margin of usually we we're doing quite a bit on our end to on the engineering side to do that. At all level in a 1% of gross margin is making a very large difference for the business and we can reinvest that in future growth. And prices by one person based on that doesn't make a big difference for customers.
I think when they are the real way to address the concerns as they keep scaling and generating much more data. And any more of the data to us is to give them more options to process that data so that you know they they can align with the with the pay to us with the value they get you know and we've been also building that on the product side. So we've pricing question is more of a product and structure question. And I just want to now that we're on cost is when I had a little clarification I think we talked about trends of gross margin.
And what we expect for the future and we gave some guidance as to operating expenses in 2023 I believe I might have spoken the operating expense guidance. In 2023 in the low 30s range excludes COGS we gave the God's God separately as far as our comments on that to clarify. Super thank you guys.
Great. Hey Olivia. Hey David. Thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to ask you a question on the guidance and maybe a compare and contrast here. So I was wondering if you could talk about maybe how to think about the levels of conservatism embedded in the full year 2023. So we're going to be able to do this through your guide today versus when you first gave guidance last year for 2022.
So I think the history and discount the major assumptions which are the organic growth or the expansion of existing customers and new logo. You know I think the difference in the actual results was or in the periods of times where we saw more than pro ratter or more than historical adoption and growth of existing customers. The ratio between you know that discount and where it ended up in actuals ended up larger but the intent and the strategy of providing this guidance on conservative assumptions relative to that has not changed.
So you know what I mean. Got it. Just one quick. Yeah. To be clear, the guidance doesn't assume that the optimization stop what we've seen over the past few quarters basically in the second half of 2022. So we know it's going to end at some point, but we don't know when exactly so we're not building that into a item. Got it. Got it.
That's helpful. Thank you. And just one follow up here question on failed capacity. You know just thinking about hiring plans there. You mentioned in the prepared remarks, you know, overall headcount to grow in the mid 20s. But continuing to grow the go to market teams at a slower pace. So just you know that mid 20s. The right way to think about sales capacity hiring this year too. Yes, yes, I think that that's right.
We are growing our investments in go to market and sales capacity approximately plus or minus that the guidance we gave in headcount growth. And again, the reason for that is we still have a ground to cover. We still have segment and geographies to cover. And also as we mentioned earlier, we're having actually great success when it comes to lending new logo and new products with customers. So our sales interactions are productive or return on investment in is there yet is there. So we need to keep doing that again.
These are the seeds of future success we're planting. And we don't intend to stop. I would clarify that because of the ramping nature of sales people, the growth rate that we had, which was in excess of about 25% in 2022 means that the coming online of that ramp capacity is that a rate higher than that in 2023 as we begin to harvest the investment from that. Got it, got it, thanks guys. Thanks for taking the questions. Thanks. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Matt Hedberg with RBC. Your line is open. Great. Thanks, guys. I'll leave for you any data points around products, but you know, I know in the past you talked about APM and logs. I think it's been a couple quarters since we had an update on the size of those businesses, but any sort of like rough magnitude of those and are they still in high growth?
I mean, we see fairly like you think of the products that are not major scale today, which are, you know, APM logs and faster monitoring. Those are are seeing about the same trend in terms of growth and Q4. And I think that's part because some of the optimization we see from customers happens across the stack because it happens upstream from us at the platform level, you know, and that's why we'll see slightly slower growth of host monitored on the platform, the platform values or on APM and also a bit less log. Some of it happens more directly at the observability level, you know, logs in particular or some aspects of the PM that are transaction based.
Where we see customers optimizing there and making sure they get the best value and cut the noise. But as a result, we see fairly similar trends across the product, so that's why we didn't call anything specific in the future. I'm sure we'll share more about the relative sizes, but again, the growth rates are not that different in the in Q4, so it was nothing to call out. Okay, thanks.
And then maybe just David on the guide, obviously with a kind of a mid 20s revenue guide, you know, you talked in the prepared remarks about having an NRR above 130 or almost two years. You know, presumably that dips below 130 any sort of commentary on how that might progress through the year. Yeah, I think you're right. If implicit in that guide is is below 130 or report to everybody as we have that, you know, we've seen, you know, it relate to the diesel, I would say on that on that that given the change in the organic growth rate that we've been talking about starting in the middle of Q2 last year.
It would be it's getting past that to the extent that it changes that changes that net retention plus or minus given the net retention is comparison against the year and year on your customers. So you do have headwinds in the compare through the time that we had the change of the organic, which we had said was in the middle of Q2 last year last year. God, thanks.
Okay, one moment. Our next question comes from Fred, have Meyer with McCory? Your line is open. Hey, thank you. I wanted to ask with respect to the slowdowns and that you've seen what's within certain customers. Have you seen anything to suggest that these could be related to layoffs in tech, either because say that off seats have been directly impacted, which is because of general disruption to dev option engineering teams?
No, we think it's mostly because they can save money on their cloud deals. You know, again, it's one of the great things about the cloud is that it's an ongoing expense. You can adjust it over time. You can restructure the way you're running applications. So there is there are some knobs you can use to optimize, you know, which you can't, if you're running everything on prem. As older costs are, our suncoes are the future. So we mostly see that there's a little bit more noise and productivity with some customers because they're having check up, you know, and so we need to talk to different people and you know, they need to organize a little bit so it can add a bit of noise and some of the conversations.
But really, the dominant motion is optimizing their cloud infrastructure, their cloud bill and their message, especially the case if they're spending a lot there. The vast majority of our products are in fast-moving usage or data volumes, not perceived. So we're not directly impacted by layoffs. Thank you for that.
And then just a quick follow up would be actually the prepared remarks. Thank you for the context and cloud costs, costs management. Perhaps more generally talk about your customer's interest in finance and how data is always positioned to be able to help customers that are understand both where they're spending, how they're spending and what sort of ROI they're seeing. Yes, our customers are definitely interested in the finance, the larger the other more they're interested in and that directly relates to the web, they're doing cloud optimization. It's a very nascent category today.
It's a nascent practice, almost of our customers. And we also have a lot of experience internally, you know, running ourselves as very large cloud operation across all of the large cloud providers. So that's why we believe we can build something that is fairly differentiated there. Our product there is having a great reception from customers even though it's still early. I mentioned earlier, you know, we signed a mid-60 year deal, annual deal with a large restaurant chain. And we see more of that coming all way. So we think it's one way in which we can also help our customers as they need to optimize and be more efficient in the short and medium. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Camille with William and Blair. Your line is open. Thanks for taking my question. I want to clarify one of the things that you're incorporating seasonally weaker growth in the first quarter due to subdued growth in the month of December. Can you span on how demand and customer conversations have trended in the first few weeks of 23 and whether it's changed since 22 years? Yeah, I think you have two different avenues.
我们的下一个问题来自William and Blair的Camille。请发言。感谢回答我的问题。我想澄清一件事情,即你们在第一季度会考虑季节性的较弱增长,因为12月份增长乏力。你能否详细介绍一下23年的需求和客户交流在最初几周的趋势,以及是否与22年有所不同?是的,我认为你们有两个不同的途径。
I think we said in new logos we had a strong quarter. We continue as we mentioned to have a strong pipeline, meaning that for new projects, new workloads, we continue to see, you know, a solid demand environment in terms of the organic. When you have this happens in most years, when you have people going on vacation and sort of reducing the amount of logs or work they're doing, you tend to see a rebound of that in January. We did see a bit of that, but given the volatility in the market, we want to be cautious in reading too much into that and we'll let everybody know how that plays out.
Yeah, mathematically, you know, we, we, the Q4 was more loaded than that, loaded in terms of all recognized revenues. So we entered Q1 in a lower lower level. So that's why we also have sequential. In terms of the trends, I've just taken with David. We, we, while that's since 90 was higher than we had seen in previous years, and we can explain that in different ways and basically customers are trying to sell money there. A lot more careful about turning off the lights when they leave vacation, basically. But we, what we see in early 2023 so far is consistent with what we've seen in Q4 in the second half of 2022 in general.
So it's still too early, really too past judgment, but it's really factors into our, our guidance, which is that we, we don't believe that the optimization has stopped. We assume it's going to continue. We don't know yet when it's going to, when it's going to stop, we know it's going to happen at some point, but we're not planning it for this year. You know, guidance. Yeah, it's helpful. Thank you.
And just as a quick follow up, it's nice to see the large wins on the federal side. I realized it's still early, but can you update us on how big of a contribution that could be in 23 and how important are additional authorizations for expanding to that market or just FedRAMP moderate a light address most of the time. So I mean, I can't give you specific numbers there. I know we're seeing, we're seeing wins, we're seeing engagements from the, from the government agencies and the communities that serve them. So all that is very good. We still have some building to do on the good market teams for that. And we also still have some things to build on the, on the products side, like there's more levels of certification we want to get to reach more of those customers. So we still have to build. When I say is we, we are, we're getting the proof points that we're a fit and that customers can use us in those environments and that there is a real market for us. That's awful. Thanks again.
Yeah, thanks. Hi guys. I'll, I'm curious if you have any sense, you know, working and talking with customers as to when they started in optimization project, how long it actually takes them to get to that, that new level. It can change if the economy gets worse. But is this something where they started and it takes them a month, a quarter to quarters. Any sense would be, would be helpful.
Yeah, so it's a, it's a little bit hard to give an answer that fits all types of customers because they're also all going through the organization a little bit differently. They have, they are different scales and there and they're going through. Different phases with their businesses in the, in the economy, you know, we think customers having multiple rounds of layoffs, for example, or having to adjust multiple times with their business. But what we see in general is that the fastest thing they can do to have an impact on their bill is to adjust some of the data that they send in logs or are in APM. And after that, you'll, you'll see them do a little bit more at the top provider level, you know, which is higher impact in terms of their own saving, but also takes a little bit more time because they need to reorganize some of their workloads and invest more engineering time in doing that. So we've seen that happen with some of our customers. For a number of our customers, we, we saw it happen with things that don't and that's, and we see them start going again, but it's too early to call it for the rest of the customer base that again they're all going through fairly different things and different scales.
Hey, guys, thanks for the question. I guess it's only if you think about the trends that you saw in the second half of last year and what you're seeing year to date, when you think about optimizations versus timeline to spin up new workloads and the effect that that has on the NRR as it progresses, what, when you look at the timeline that you think that takes and the anniversary of these headwinds, you know, particularly with the larger customers, how does that look from a linearity perspective over the course of the year.
So right now, you know, in, not again, as we're assuming that we, we're seeing the same trends of growth or reaching customers throughout the year, like we're not, we're not assuming any inflection, we're assuming a continuation of that with some level of conservatism compared to the actual result last year. That's what we're building in. The, again, we believe that there's going to be some reaction at some point as the optimization has on its course, but given the level of macro uncertainty, I think it's it's too difficult to or we can't actually tell you when. Again, we've listened to the call of the of the cut provider. They also can tell you when. And so we're being prudent with the guys there.
Perfect. And then David, maybe just one for you around cash and cash conversion for cash flow. As we look at the year, just curious if there's any kind of different flexibility in payment terms or even just the assumption for the cash conversion from operating income to cash flow for the full guidance to 23.
We've always said that our free cash flow is been around the slightly higher than our EBIT margin. If you look back, you'll see that it's in some quarters a little above and some quarters a little below. We have not seen any changes of in material changes in payment terms or or the flows of cash. So there's nothing we've seen so far that would cause us to change our views about cash flow conversion for the company.
Thank you all. So I just wanted to take a minute to first thank all customers for trusting us with their business and partnering with us. I know some of them are going through difficult times last year and also early this year. And so we're working with them. Actually, we all come out of it stronger. I also want to thank our employees, data dogs everywhere around the world for actually delivering a fantastic year in 2022 from all of the metrics we control ourselves. We saw some slowdown in consumption with some customers, but we also delivered a lot of value for customers. We scaled our local to market teams. We did great in terms of landing new locals attaching new products, shipping products that saw more clients for customers. And we think that this was very well for the future. So I'm very optimistic. I'm looking forward to a fantastic year in 2023 with everyone and on these are close the call.