Datadog

Datadog is a monitoring and observability platform delivered as software as a service. It brings metrics from servers and containers, traces from applications and logs from every service into one place, so a team can move from an alert to the slow request or failing host behind it without switching tools. The company was founded in New York in 2010 by Olivier Pomel and Alexis Lê-Quôc and is listed on Nasdaq.

Data reaches Datadog through the Datadog Agent, which runs on Linux, Windows and macOS hosts and inside Docker and Kubernetes, and through more than 1,000 integrations covering cloud providers, databases, web servers, CI tools and chat and paging services. Accounts are created on one of several regional sites in the US, the EU, the UK, Japan and Australia; each site is independent and data is not shared between them.

Key features

• Infrastructure Monitoring. Host and container metrics, dashboards, host maps and alerting, with 15-month metric retention on paid plans.
• APM. Distributed tracing that follows a request across services, with per-host pricing.
• Log Management. Ingest, index and archive logs, with separate prices for ingestion, indexed events and long-term Flex storage.
• Error Tracking. Groups application errors into issues and is sold separately by error volume.
• Synthetic and Real User Monitoring. Scripted checks of APIs and pages, and measurement of what real visitors experience.
• Mobile and API access. iOS and Android apps for dashboards and alerts on the go, and an HTTP API for automation.

Who it is for

Datadog suits engineering and operations teams running services on cloud platforms or Kubernetes who want one system for metrics, traces and logs. Small teams can start on the free tier, while larger organisations use it across hundreds of hosts with security and governance features on the Enterprise tiers.

Pricing at a glance

• Infrastructure Free: $0 for up to five hosts, with one-day metric retention.
• Infrastructure Pro: $15 per host per month billed annually, or $18 on demand.
• Infrastructure Enterprise: $23 per host per month billed annually, or $27 on demand; adds machine-learning alerts and Live Processes.
• APM: from $31 per host per month billed annually alongside Infrastructure Monitoring.
• Logs: $0.10 per ingested GB, plus $1.70 per million indexed events for 15-day retention, billed annually.
• Error Tracking: a flat $25 a month billed annually for under 50,000 errors a month.

A 14-day free trial needs no credit card. Prices as checked on 10 October 2026; confirm on the vendor's pricing page.

Things to consider

• Each product is billed separately, so a full setup of infrastructure, APM, logs and errors adds up; model the cost per host and per GB before rolling out widely.
• On-demand prices are noticeably higher than annual commitments.
• Log costs depend on both volume ingested and events indexed; filtering what gets indexed is the main lever.
• Choose the regional site carefully at sign-up, since data cannot be shared across sites.

Getting started

1. Start the free trial and pick the regional site closest to your data requirements.
2. Install the Agent on a host or in your Kubernetes cluster following the Agent documentation.
3. Enable integrations for your cloud provider, databases and web servers.
4. Add APM tracing libraries to one service and review its traces.
5. Build a dashboard and alerts, then connect Slack or PagerDuty for notifications.