Datadog

Modern monitoring & security

Freemium

About Datadog

Datadog is the enterprise-grade observability platform that unifies metrics, traces, and logs in one place. Used by companies like Airbnb, Samsung, and Peloton, Datadog provides end-to-end visibility into your entire stack—from infrastructure and containers to applications and user experience. The platform's strength is correlation: trace a user request from frontend to database, seeing exactly where latency occurs. Key products include Infrastructure Monitoring (servers, containers, Kubernetes), APM (distributed tracing, profiling), Log Management (centralized logs with ML-based patterns), and Security Monitoring (threat detection, compliance). The 750+ integrations cover virtually every technology—AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, databases, message queues, and more. Pricing is complex and can be expensive: Infrastructure starts at $15/host/mo, APM at $31/host/mo, and logs are volume-based. Free tier exists but is very limited (5 hosts, 1-day retention). Datadog is overkill for simple apps but essential for companies running complex, distributed systems where visibility directly impacts revenue.

Key Features

Infrastructure monitoring for hosts, containers, serverless

APM with distributed tracing across services

Centralized log management with ML pattern detection

Real User Monitoring (RUM) for frontend performance

Security monitoring and threat detection

750+ integrations with cloud and DevOps tools

Custom dashboards and visualizations

Intelligent alerting with anomaly detection

Service Level Objectives (SLO) tracking

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Unified platform correlates metrics, traces, and logs
• Exceptional integration coverage (750+)
• Best-in-class visualization and dashboards
• Powerful querying and analytics
• Active development with frequent new features
• Strong Kubernetes and container support

Cons

• Expensive—costs escalate quickly at scale
• Complex pricing model difficult to predict
• Steep learning curve for all features
• Overkill for small projects or simple apps
• Vendor lock-in with proprietary query language
• Free tier is very limited

Best For

Enterprise companies with complex distributed systems DevOps teams needing unified observability Companies running microservices at scale Organizations with strict SLA requirements Teams where monitoring ROI justifies cost