Observability & APM · Datadog, Inc.

Datadog

Cloud monitoring platform unifying infrastructure metrics, APM, logs, and RUM in one billed-by-the-part SaaS.

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Datadog is a SaaS observability platform that combines infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, real user monitoring, and security signals in a single UI with shared tags across all telemetry. Agents run on hosts, containers, or serverless functions and ship data to Datadog's cloud backend; there is no self-hosted option. Its breadth and prebuilt integrations (800+) make it a common default for platform teams that want one pane of glass rather than assembling open-source components, but the trade-off is a pricing model with many independently metered dimensions — hosts, APM hosts, log ingestion, indexed log events, custom metrics, and RUM sessions all bill separately.

At a glance

Vendor Datadog, Inc.
Pricing model Usage-based
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud
Open source No
Best for Platform and SRE teams that want a single managed SaaS covering infra, APM, logs and RUM without operating their own backend.

Pricing

Billed per product (infra hosts, APM hosts, log GB ingested plus indexed events, custom metrics) — costs compound as you enable more modules.

Plan Price Notes
Infrastructure Pro $15/host/month billed annually; $18 on-demand
Infrastructure Enterprise $23/host/month billed annually; $27 on-demand
APM $31/host/month when bundled with Infrastructure Pro; standalone $36
Log Management ingest $0.10/GB per ingested/scanned GB, plus $1.70 per million indexed log events for 15-day retention

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features

  • Infrastructure and container monitoring with 800+ vendor integrations
  • Distributed tracing and APM with code-level flame graphs
  • Log management with unified tagging across metrics, traces and logs
  • Real user monitoring and session replay
  • Synthetic monitoring for API and browser checks
  • Custom dashboards and Watchdog anomaly detection
  • Cloud Security Management for posture and workload signals

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Head to head

Alternatives

New Relic All-in-one observability platform pricing on data ingest plus per-user seats rather than per-host agents. Dynatrace AI-driven observability platform with automatic topology discovery and per-hour, per-resource consumption pricing. Honeycomb Observability platform built around high-cardinality event querying for debugging production issues, priced per event volume. Chronosphere Cloud-native observability platform focused on controlling metrics and log cardinality costs at large scale.

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Terms to know

Dashboard A visual display of the metrics a team needs to monitor, usually updated on a schedule or in real time. Anomaly detection Identifying data points or patterns that deviate significantly from expected or normal behavior. Data observability Continuous automated monitoring of pipelines and datasets to catch freshness, volume and quality problems early. Session replay A reconstructed playback of one visitor's clicks, cursor movement and scrolling on a page, captured via browser events. Application performance monitoring (APM) Monitoring that tracks application response time, errors, and throughput, tying degraded performance to its root cause. Distributed tracing Following a single request across multiple services in a distributed system to see where time was spent or an error occurred.

Related guides

How to choose an observability platform Choose an APM/observability platform by how it prices telemetry, whether it auto-instruments or asks you to, and how it correlates signals into a root cause.