How Much Does Datadog Cost? A Breakdown of Datadog APM Pricing

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is vital for maintaining optimal digital experiences. Imagine your e-commerce platform slows during a flash sale, frustrating potential buyers and impacting revenue. In our blog on Datadog APM pricing, we'll help you assess whether  Datadog APM is a worthwhile investment for your business.

If you’re looking for a tool with a free APM to evaluate whether Datadog APM fits your needs, Alerty's solution is perfect for you. It offers insights into Datadog APM's pricing and features, allowing you to choose one that aligns with your business goals.

Table of Contents

• What Is Datadog?
• Features and Functionalities of Datadog
• How Does Datadog APM Pricing Work?
• Datadog APM Pricing Explained
• Why Is Datadog So Expensive?
• Catch Issues Before They Affect Your Users With 
• Comprehensive Monitoring for Modern Applications

What Is Datadog?

Datadog is a comprehensive monitoring and observability platform designed to help organizations gain valuable insights into their applications and infrastructure. It offers powerful features such as:

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Application performance monitoring (APM)
• Log management
• Synthetic monitoring

Datadog provides a unified view of your entire stack, empowering teams to detect and resolve issues quickly, ensure optimal performance, and make informed decisions.

Datadog currently offers 22 unique solutions, each with its features and pricing. These solutions include:

• Cloud infrastructure
• Application
• Container
• Network
• Logs
• Serverless monitoring and many more

Datadog is highly adaptable to most organizations and efficiently provides users with detailed observability for their entire application stack. 

Features and Functionalities of Datadog

Monitoring

Datadog offers robust monitoring capabilities to track the performance of various components in real time. This includes monitoring:

• Server health
• Network activity
• Application response times
• And more

Logging

Datadog allows organizations to centralize and analyze log data, aiding in troubleshooting and identifying patterns. The platform offers log forwarding capabilities for testing and comparing log monitoring capabilities.

Real-Time Monitoring

The real-time monitoring feature provides instant updates on system performance and status.

API Monitoring

Datadog enables monitoring of APIs to ensure their availability and responsiveness.

Response Time Tracking

The platform provides insights into application response times, enabling optimization for better user experiences.

Customizable Alerts

Users can set up customized alerts based on defined thresholds, ensuring timely notifications of anomalies or performance deviations.

Visualization and Dashboards

Datadog's platform allows users to create custom dashboards and visualizations, aiding in analyzing data and tracking performance trends.

Reporting

Datadog’s reporting tools help organizations generate comprehensive reports for informed decision-making.

Monitor Your App, Database, and More, for Free

Alerty is a cloud monitoring service for developers and early-stage startups.

Key Features

• Application Performance Monitoring
• Database Monitoring
• Incident Management
• Supports technologies like NextJS, React, Vue, and Node.js
• Helps developers identify and fix issues
• Monitors databases such as Supabase, PostgreSQL, and RDS
• Tracks key metrics like CPU usage and memory consumption

Related Reading

• Observability vs Monitoring
• Application Performance Metrics
• Application Security Monitoring
• Application Monitoring Best Practices
• Web App Monitoring
• APM vs Observability
• How To Monitor A Web Server
• Application Performance Issues
• Kubernetes Application Monitoring
• Automated Anomaly Detection

How Does Datadog APM Pricing Work?

Datadog's pricing primarily revolves around the volume of data ingested and the features utilized. Key factors influencing costs include:

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
• Log Management
• Synthetic Monitoring

Organizations can effectively analyze and optimize their expenses by comprehending how these components contribute to the overall Datadog price. Datadog offers different plans designed to cater to various needs:

Free Trial

Datadog provides a 14-day free trial that allows users to experience its core features and functionality. This is an excellent opportunity to test drive the platform and understand its capabilities before committing to a paid Datadog price.

Pro Plan

The Pro plan is the most popular option, offering essential monitoring and analytics features. It provides:

• Real-time performance tracking
• Custom dashboards
• Integrations with numerous technologies and services

The pricing for the Pro Plan varies based on usage factors outlined below.

Enterprise Plan

Datadog provides the Enterprise Plan for organizations with advanced requirements and more extensive infrastructure. It includes additional features like:

• APM
• Increased log retention
• Enhanced support tailored to complex environments

The Enterprise plan pricing is based on a custom quote, depending on specific needs.

Datadog APM Pricing Explained

Datadog offers various services with various pricing structures, making it complicated to understand which components are included and how they are charged. Here, we'll delve into the nitty-gritty of Datadog's application performance monitoring (APM) pricing scheme.

Infrastructure Monitoring Pricing

Datadog offers a free plan for infrastructure monitoring. Once you exceed the free tier, charges start at $15 per host per month and can increase to $23 per host per month.

Log Management Pricing

For Log Management, Datadog charges $0.10 per ingested or scanned GB per month and $1.27 per million monthly log events to retain logs for 7 days.

Synthetic Monitoring Pricing

Synthetic Monitoring costs $5 per thousand test runs for API monitors and $12 per thousand monthly test runs for Browser monitors.

Application Performance Monitoring Pricing

Datadog's APM service costs between $31 to $40 per monthly host.

Real User Monitoring Pricing

Real User Monitoring costs $1.50 per 1,000 sessions for mobile only and can go up to $1.80 per 1,000 sessions.

Conditional Service Offerings

Datadog pushes bundled services, meaning certain services can only be acquired if you pay for another service. For instance, you must first be an Infrastructure Monitoring customer to purchase Database Monitoring. This approach may compel you to pay for features you neither want nor need.

Data Retention and Rehydration Costs

Longer data retention can drive up costs, compelling you to choose the data you can easily access rather than that which must be archived. Data rehydration, if needed, comes at an additional cost of $1.70 per million log events per month.

Complex Agent-Based Pricing

Datadog’s agent-based pricing can be complex as it is subject to variations based on the type of data collected and the collection frequency.

Overages and On-Demand Pricing

Datadog's pricing often reflects annual commitments. If you exceed your data or host limits, you may incur on-demand pricing for overages, which can be quite expensive.

Support Costs

Standard support from Datadog is free but limited to business hours for non-critical issues. For round-the-clock support on general issues, you must pay 8% of your monthly spending, with a minimum of $2,000 per month.

Why Is Datadog So Expensive?

Datadog's pricing model can be challenging to predict and budget for accurately. Their charges are based on the amount of data ingested and analyzed, such as:

• Hosts
• Custom metrics
• Logs
• Traces

Rising Costs and Billing Concerns

As your usage grows, so do the costs. This type of pricing can add up quickly and make it an expensive option. Recently, it was revealed that Datadog charged a cryptocurrency company a bill of $65 million USD, raising concerns from other users about their pricing model. 

Costly Concerns

Datadog's pricing structure is quite expensive, rising as usage grows. This unpredictability can make it difficult to budget accurately and lead to high costs for many companies. If you are looking for a cost-effective APM solution, Datadog may not be the best choice due to its expensive pricing structure.

Cost-Effective APM With Alerty

Evaluating the worthiness of Datadog’s pricing demands by examining various factors. One aspect that is not well-received about Datadog is its billing and support system. Users have reported difficulties in resolving deployment mistakes and billing issues. 

Customer Frustration and Lack of Flexibility

Users have felt frustrated by the lack of support and the inability to drop metrics from agents or adjust billing accordingly. This highlights the need for better flexibility and responsiveness in addressing customer concerns.

Monitor Your Entire Stack for Free

Alerty, a new APM tool, offers a cost-effective solution for monitoring and alerting. 

Alerty Free Tier Benefits

• Access all features without limitations
• Free to use
• Allows developers to get started without financial commitment

Affordable, Comprehensive Monitoring for All

In the long run, when Alerty starts to offer paid tiers, the platform will still let you monitor your entire stack at a fraction of the cost of competitors, such as Datadog, where a single database monitoring can cost around $84 per month. This pricing strategy should particularly be appealing to startups and small businesses that require robust monitoring capabilities without the burden of high costs.