Datadog
Cloud observability — metrics, traces and logs — with no monitoring servers to run.
paid · trial SaaS · ad-safe
What it is
Datadog is a cloud observability platform covering metrics, traces (APM), logs and alerting in one web UI, with hundreds of integrations. It watches hybrid infrastructure without you running any monitoring servers of your own.
Problems it solves
- You do not want to run and scale your own monitoring stack.
- You need metrics, traces and logs correlated in one place.
How administrators use it
- Install the agent on hosts and enable integrations for your services.
- Build dashboards and monitors, and correlate APM traces with logs during incidents.
Strengths & trade-offs
Strengths
- Nothing to self-host.
- Metrics, APM and logs together.
- Hundreds of integrations.
Trade-offs
- Usage-based billing can grow quickly.
- Data leaves your premises for the vendor cloud.
Questions
Is Datadog self-hosted?
No — it is a SaaS platform. You install an agent and data goes to Datadog’s cloud.
How is Datadog billed?
Usage-based (per host, plus APM, logs and more), with a free tier up to 5 hosts.
Alternatives
Grafana
Visualisation and dashboards over Prometheus, Zabbix, databases and clouds.
open source hybrid
Prometheus Time-series monitoring and alerting, the de-facto standard for cloud-native systems.
open source desktop download
Zabbix Open-source monitoring for servers, network gear, VMs and applications.
open source desktop download