What are the disadvantages of Datadog?

Based on user reviews, Datadog has a 4.1 out of 5 value for money rating. Users must pay based on their usage of the software; therefore, large organizations with complex networks may find it expensive. According to users, Datadog also has a significant learning curve, which can make it challenging to get up to speed quickly.

How much does Datadog cost?

Datadog offers a free infrastructure monitoring plan that supports up to five hosts and retains metrics for only a single day. Its paid infrastructure plans start at $15 per host (a system you're observing) per month and go up to $34 per host per month. You may have to pay more for additional features, such as add-ons and custom metrics.

Datadog is used across various industries by IT and development teams. It's also a solution for cloud architects, as it provides them with visibility into how assets are performing against expectations. Organizations with many distributed apps also turn to Datadog to centralize their performance management. Small to midsize businesses account for more than half of the Datadog reviews on our site.

What is unique about Datadog?

Datadog is unique in that it gives users a single solution for observing app performance, collecting logs, performing traces, and building granular analytics reports. It also comes with tools that use machine learning to detect anomalies, which can prevent serious problems from interrupting operations.

Updated July 4, 2025 at 3:14 AM

Datadog 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

Written by Ines Bahr

Senior Content Analyst

Edited by Mehar Luthra

Team Lead, Content

Wondering if Datadog is right for your organization?

Our Dashboard Software selection experts can help you in 15 minutes or less.

On this page

Our Summary
Pricing and Plans
Features
Integrations
Key Sentiments
User Reviews
Frequently Asked Questions

Our Summary

Datadog

4.6

(354)

Pros:

Customizable dashboards
Real-time monitoring

Cons:

High cost
Steep learning curve

Pricing

Starting at $15.00 per month

What is Datadog:

Datadog’s cloud platform monitors, secures, and analyzes a business’s complete tech stack. Used by IT teams, engineers, developers, and others, the software integrates and automates infrastructure and application performance monitoring, real-user monitoring, log management, and more.

Why we like Datadog:

With an overall rating of 4.6/5 stars based on verified user reviews, Datadog was named a FrontRunner in our top dashboard software guide. It rates very well for functionality (4.5), and users highlight the platform’s real-time notifications, data connectors, and data visualization capabilities as its top features.

Who should use Datadog:

Datadog serves businesses of all sizes across a range of use cases, including application security, hybrid cloud monitoring, and unified commerce monitoring. It’s popular among small to midsize organizations, with 54% of reviewers coming from businesses with 2-200 employees.

Datadog Screenshots

Datadog Overview

Datadog is the monitoring, security and analytics platform for developers, IT operations teams, security engineers and business users in the cloud age.

Datadog's SaaS platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring and log management to provide unified, real-time observability of our customers' entire technology stack.

Datadog is used by organizations of all sizes and across a wide range of industries to enable digital transformation and cloud migration, drive collaboration among development, operations, security and busine...

Datadog Pricing and Plans

Starting price: $15.00 per month

Free Trial

Free Version

Free

$0.00

flat rate

Plan includes:

Data retention
Enterprise Grade Security
Unlimited User Accounts
Collaboration
Standard Metrics
Out of the box Dashboards

Pro

$15.00

per month

Plan includes:

500+ Integrations Included
Container Monitoring
Custom Events
Single sign-on with SAML
Testing for Outliers
SCIM
Custom Metrics

Enterprise

$23.00

per month

Plan includes:

Machine Learning
Anomaly Detection
Forecast Insights
IP Allowlist
Unlimited Alerts
Insights and Correlation Engine

DevSecOps Pro

$22.00

per month

Plan includes:

Cloud Security Posture Management
Vulnerability Management
Case Management
Workflow

DevSecOps Enterprise

$34.00

per month

Plan includes:

System File Integrity Monitoring
Data Security
Monitor cloud workloads

Confused about pricing? We've got you covered.

Get a personalized pricing breakdown tailored to your specific needs—no guesswork, no generic estimates.

Our Analysis of Datadog's Pricing Plans

Datadog offers basic monitoring plans, as well as a range of add-ons and bespoke offerings. Its Infrastructure Monitoring suite, which includes three plan levels (Free, Pro, and Enterprise), is the company’s foundational offering. Several other plan suites can only be purchased once Infrastructure Monitoring has been purchased. Let’s take a closer look at Infrastructure Monitoring, and then we’ll cover additional Datadog service offerings....

**Infrastructure Monitoring plans** Datadog offers three tiers for standard infrastructure monitoring: Free, Pro, and Enterprise. The plans provide metrics, visualizations, and alerts, enabling engineering teams to maintain, optimize, and secure their environments. Within this suite, add-ons are available for network device monitoring, serverless monitoring, and cloud cost management. **Free plan** The Free plan is designed for small-scale environments or those evaluating Datadog. It includes up to five hosts (any physical/virtual OS instance that you monitor) and one day of metric retention. **Pros:** - **Free:** Small teams or trial users can access basic infrastructure monitoring at no cost. - **Integrations:** Users can access over 900 integrations, ranging from AI tools to source control systems. - **Dashboards:** Analyze system-wide data with out-of-the-box real-time dashboards. **Cons:** - **Limited hosts:** You can only monitor up to five instances. - **Limited data retention:** Plan only offers one day of data retention. - **No advanced features:** Unable to access alerts, custom metrics, custom events, and more. **Pro plan** The Pro plan is designed for growing teams needing deeper visibility. It costs $15 per host per month (billed annually) or $18 per host per month (on-demand billing) and offers 15 months of metric retention. Additionally, there is a Pro plan specifically for DevSecOps (development, security, and operations) that adds cloud security management features. The cost is $22 or $27 per host per month, depending on the billing frequency. **Pros:** - **Long-term data retention:** Plan expands data retention to 15 months. - **Alerting:** Unlimited alerts are available to identify problems with your business’s infrastructure. - **Workflows and containers:** Allows five workflow executions and five containers per host per month. **Cons:** - **Lacking advanced tools:** Many advanced functions are still missing, including anomaly detection, forecast monitoring, and workload protection. - **No IP allowlist:** Doesn’t include the ability to predetermine which IP addresses can access the network. - **Feature limits:** Users are limited to half the number of container monitoring functions, custom metrics, and custom events as in the Enterprise plan. **Enterprise plan** The Enterprise plan is designed for large organizations with complex infrastructure. It costs $23 per host per month (billed annually) or $27 per host per month (on-demand billing) and offers 15 months of customizable metric retention. Additionally, there is an Enterprise plan specifically designed for DevSecOps (development, security, and operations), which includes cloud security management features. The cost is $34 or $41 per host per month, depending on the billing frequency. **Pros:** - **Enhanced security and access control:** Allow only pre-approved IP addresses to access your network and resources. - **Higher container and metric limits:** Includes double the container monitoring and custom metric limits of the Pro plan. - **Live process monitoring:** Get real-time visibility into the processes running on your infrastructure. **Cons:** - **Highest cost:** Users with multiple instances that require monitoring may find the Enterprise plan too expensive. - **Feature overkill:** The extensive advanced features may not be necessary for smaller organizations. - **Add-ons:** Even at this level plan, services such as IoT (Internet of Things) device monitoring require paid add-ons. **Add-ons and other offerings** Datadog customers may also purchase additional monitoring and other services, covering applications, logs, security, digital experience, software delivery, service management, and AI and AI observability. Services typically offer two pricing options: one for annual billing and one for on-demand billing. **Applications** Application performance monitoring allows users to improve the end-to-end performance of their cloud-scale applications. Users can choose from three plans (APM, APM Pro, and APM Enterprise) that range from $31 to $40 per host per month (billed annually) or $36 to $48 per host per month (on-demand billing). A comparable infrastructure monitoring plan is required to purchase one of the APM plans. Additional application-focused offerings include: - **Universal service monitoring: $9 or $13 per infrastructure monitoring host per month (included in the APM plans) - **Data streams monitoring: $15 or $18 per host per month (included in APM Pro and Enterprise plans) - **Database monitoring: $70 or $84 per database host per month (requires an infrastructure monitoring plan) - **Data jobs monitoring:** $0.05 or $0.072 per host per hour **Logs** Datadog’s log management offering allows users to analyze and archive log data. Its Ingest plan starts at $0.10 per ingested or scanned GB per month, and its Standard Indexing plan (with 15-day retention) is $1.70 per million log events per month. The provider also offers several Flex plans tailored to individual retention needs. Log management can be purchased separately, without requiring an infrastructure or application monitoring plan. Other log-related offerings include: - **Error tracking:** $25 or $36 per month for 50,000 errors (included in the Indexing plan and APM plans) - **Sensitive data scanner:** $0.30 or $0.45 per scanned GB per month - **Audit trail:** 2% or 3% of monthly spend - **Observability pipelines:** $0.10 or $0.12 per ingested GB per hour **Security** Datadog offers two cloud security plans that give users a unified view of cloud security threats. CSM Pro starts at $10 per host per month (billed annually) or $12 per host per month (on-demand billing). CSM Enterprise starts at $25 per host per month (billed annually) or $30 per host per month (on-demand billing). The plans do not require the purchase of any other Datadog plan. Other security offerings include: - **Workload protection:** $15 or $18 per host per month (included in CSM Enterprise) - **Cloud SIEM:** $5 or $7.50 per million events analyzed per month - **App and API protection:** $31 or $36 per host per month (requires infrastructure monitoring plan) - **Code security:** $40 or $57.60 per committer per month **Digital experience** Datadog’s suite of digital experience tools enables businesses to monitor usage of web and mobile applications, allowing them to quickly and effectively troubleshoot issues. Error tracking, as covered in the log management offering, is available, along with several other services. - **Product analytics:** $0.80 or $1.15 per 1,000 sessions per month; a session replay add-on is available for $2.50 or $3.60 per 1,000 sessions per month - **Real user monitoring (RUM) measure and investigate:** $0.15 or $0.22 per 1,000 sessions per month or $3 or $4.50 per 1,000 sessions per month - **Synthetic testing and monitoring:** Includes plans for API testing (starting at $5 or $7.20 per 10,000 test runs per month), browser testing (starting at $12 or $18 per 1,000 test runs per month), and mobile app testing (starting at $50 or $72 per 100 test runs per month). **Software delivery** Datadog enables users to track and analyze their software delivery performance via multiple tools and services. These include API, browser, and mobile app testing, as detailed in the section above. Other software delivery offerings include: - **Internal developer portal:** Includes a free Standard plan and a custom-quoted Premium plan - **CI pipeline visibility:** $8 or $12 per committer per month - **Test optimization:** $20 or $29 per committer per month **Service management** Users can efficiently detect issues within their system and address them without leaving the platform through Datadog’s service management services. Users can choose from three incident response plans (On-Call, Incident Management, and a plan that bundles both), which range from $20 to $58 per seat per month. Other service management tools and services include: - **App builder:** $35 or $51 per published app per month - **Event management:** $0.10 or $0.14 per event evaluated by a correlation pattern per month - **Workflow automation: $10 or $14 per 100 workflow executions per month **AI and AI observability** Datadog also offers two AI-related services. Its large language module (LLM) observability tool helps monitor and secure your LLM applications. It costs $8 or $12 per 10,000 monitored LLM requests per month. The platform also allows users to automate alert investigations with agentic AI. That service requires contacting Datadog for a quote. **Conclusion** Datadog’s pricing structure is modular and scalable, making it suitable for a wide range of use cases. Its three foundational infrastructure plans may be good choices for small teams (Free plan), growing businesses (Pro plan), and larger organizations (Enterprise plan). However, Datadog offers a wealth of monitoring plan suites, add-ons, and other tools and services. Some of these are included in various packages or require the purchase of another plan first. There are multi-year and volume discounts available, and most plans or services offer a free trial. Due to the complexity and the numerous possible combinations and plan permutations, we recommend that you thoroughly understand your budget, goals, and monitoring needs before contacting the provider to review your options.

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recommendations

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Datadog Features

Drawn from insights across 354 verified reviews, we've outlined Datadog's best and worst rated features and how they stack up against the average rating.

Datadog's score

Category average

Datadog's Best Rated Features

Real-Time Reporting

4.83

4.11 category average

Log Collection

4.78

4.51 category average

Dashboard

4.75

4.40 category average

Datadog's Worst Rated Features

Network Monitoring

3.80

4.35 category average

Application-Level Analysis

3.92

3.92 category average

Activity Tracking

4.0

4.11 category average

Popular features found in Dashboard
Access Controls/Permissions
Alerts/Notifications
Data Import/Export
Data Visualization
Functions/Calculations
Performance Metrics
Reporting/Analytics
Scorecards
Search/Filter
Widgets
More features of Datadog
Activity Dashboard
Activity Tracking
Ad hoc Reporting
Alerts/Escalation
Analytics
Anomaly Detection
API
Application-Level Analysis
Application Management
Application Security
Archiving & Retention
Asset Tracking
Audit Management
Audit Trail
Automated Discovery
Availability Testing
Baseline Manager
Bottleneck Identification
Capacity Analytics
Capacity Management
Capacity Planning
Chat/Messaging
Cloud Application Security
Collaboration Tools
Commenting/Notes
Communications Management
Compliance Management
Compliance Tracking
Container Monitoring
Content Management
Continuous Deployment
Continuous Integration
Continuous Monitoring
Correlation Analysis
Cost Management
CPU Monitoring
Customizable Dashboard
Customizable Reports
Dashboard
Dashboard Creation
Data Aggregation
Data Analysis Tools
Database Monitoring
Data Classification
Data Cleansing
Data Collection
Data Connectors
Data Discovery
Data Migration
Data Storage Management
Debugging
Dependency Tracking
Device Auto Discovery
Diagnostic Tools
Disaster Recovery
Drag & Drop
Email Alerts
Email Monitoring
Event Analysis
Event Logs
Event Tracking
For eCommerce
For Websites
FTP Monitoring
Graphical User Interface
High Volume Processing
HIPAA Compliant
Historical Trend Analysis
Incident Management
Incident Reporting
Indexing
Investigation Management
Issue Management
Issue Tracking
IT Incident Management
IT Monitoring
KPI Monitoring
Log Access
Log Analysis
Log Collection
Log Management
Log Parsing
Log Rotation
Machine Learning
Mobile Network Troubleshooting
Monitoring
Move & Copy
Multi-Cloud Management
Multi-Language
Multiple Data Sources
Multi-User Collaboration
Natural Language Processing
Network Analysis
Network Monitoring
Network Provisioning
Network Resource Management
Parameterized Testing
Pattern Detection and Recognition
PCI Compliance
Performance Analysis
Performance Management
Performance Monitoring
Policy Management
Predictive Analytics
Prioritization
Problem Area Alerts
Process/Workflow Automation
Query Analysis
Real-time Alerts
Real-Time Analytics
Real-Time Data
Real-Time Monitoring
Real-Time Notifications
Real-Time Reporting
Reporting & Statistics
Requirements-Based Testing
Resource Management
Resource Optimization
Risk Alerts
Root Cause Analysis
Scheduled/Automated Reports
Server Logs
Server Monitoring
Service Level Agreement (SLA) Management
Single Page View
Single Sign On
SSL Security
Statistical Analysis
Status Tracking
Tagging
Task Management
Third-Party Integrations
Threat Intelligence
Threat Response
Threshold Alerts
Transaction Monitoring
Trend Analysis
Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting Reports
Uptime Reporting
User Management
Virtual Machine Monitoring
Visual Analytics
Vulnerability Scanning
Web-Application Security
Website Analytics
Web Traffic Reporting
Workflow Management

Datadog Integrations

Based on 354 verified reviews, we've identified products most frequently integrated with Datadog.

Slack

Integration rated 4.7 from 16 reviews

Rajeev Yeamin

Senior DevOps Engineer

Used for more than 2 years

Reviewed June 2023

"Datadog alerts can be sent to Slack channel."

Amazon EC2

Integration rated 4.5 from 9 reviews

AWS CloudTrail

Integration rated 4.7 from 7 reviews

Amazon RDS

Integration rated 4.6 from 7 reviews

Google Cloud

Integration rated 4.0 from 6 reviews

GitHub

Integration rated 4.2 from 5 reviews

Jira

Integration rated 5.0 from 5 reviews

See all 134 integrations

Datadog Key Sentiments

We analyzed 354 verified reviews for Datadog to find out what actual users really think.

Most Positive Sentiments

Customer support

61% Positive

15% Neutral

24% Negative

Users acknowledge Datadog's customer support as responsive and helpful, particularly in providing prompt feedback and assistance. However, some reviewers express frustration with dismissive responses and the need for better product support.

Setup and configuration

58% Positive

17% Neutral

25% Negative

Datadog's setup and configuration process is generally easy and hassle-free, according to users, which allows them to get started quickly. Reviewers appreciate the straightforward setup and useful features available from the beginning. Nonetheless, some reviewers mention initial configuration challenges and uncertainty about the cost implications of specific configurations.

Performance monitoring

58% Positive

34% Neutral

8% Negative

Users find Datadog highly effective for comprehensive monitoring of their application performance and infrastructure. They appreciate its real-time monitoring capabilities, which help them identify and resolve issues promptly. Additionally, reviewers highlight the tool's ability to cover various aspects of monitoring, making it a reliable solution for managing complex IT environments.

Least Positive Sentiments

Log management

50% Positive

37% Neutral

13% Negative

Reviewers value Datadog for its robust log management features, which aid in real-time tracking and troubleshooting. They find it particularly useful for capturing and analyzing logs from various sources, ensuring performance and reliability. Users also appreciate the extensive detail and ease of use in managing logs, which enhances their ability to maintain system health.

Data analytics

53% Positive

26% Neutral

21% Negative

Reviewers find Datadog effective for collecting and analyzing data from various sources, providing a unified view of their IT infrastructure. They appreciate the platform's ability to filter and monitor data efficiently. However, some users face challenges with data filtering limitations, complex data APIs, and difficulties in selecting the appropriate data types.

Integration services

57% Positive

28% Neutral

15% Negative

Datadog's integration with a wide range of third-party tools and services is valued by users. Reviewers find it beneficial for maintaining a comprehensive overview of their infrastructure by connecting with various platforms, such as AWS, Jira, and Slack. They also highlight the ease of integrating Datadog with other technologies, which enhances their overall system visibility and management.

Datadog User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.6

Ratings Breakdown

61%

36%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

4.3

Value for money

4.1

Customer support

4.3

Functionality

4.5

Terence Z.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

501-1000 employees

Used weekly for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed January 2026

Great at what it does

Overall datadog is good once you get the hang of it. However, the it may take a couple days to get adjusted to using it

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

It allows me to look through logs thats required for my day-to-day job. I appreciate the quick filter options available that are easily accessible on the left-hand side

Cons:

Sometimes it feels overwhelming when you are shown a huge amount of data at once. I believe there is also a steep learning curve too.

Robert M.

Verified reviewer

Food Production

51-200 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Reviewed December 2025

Essential for teams

After bringing Datadog to two companies it has proved essential to bringing observability to all. Having unlimited seats means everyone has access to the tools needed for visibility.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The ability to integrate it with nearly any application has proved to be essential for bringing multiple legacy systems under one easy view.

Cons:

The cost can get out of control if you don't monitor it. It has to be treated like AWS/Azure/Google where you have someone monitor it's usage.

Reasons for switching to Datadog

The user limit and also the ability to search and filter is not intuitive for non technical.

Verified

Reviewer

Computer Software

2-10 employees

Used weekly for less than 2 years

Reviewed November 2025

Perfect platform to monitor your systems

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

I've gained experience with filtering and creating dashboard, that's really amazing considering the huge amount of data you can store

Cons:

Nothing, it's amazing, you can do whatever you want with the platform. I really don't see any cons when using it

Amol G.

Verified reviewer

Financial Services

1001-5000 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Reviewed December 2025

Data-dog’s best in the market, why?

Its impressive good fast reliable. As most of the integrations are very easy to implement. Documentation clear, support is highly knowledgeable, public cloud supports is unbeatable, they do prove why they are on costlier end comparing to other tools available in the marker

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

UI, how fast and reliable the integrations are, we haven't faced any massive issues till now in last 3 years

Cons:

Cost, i think most of the customer might feel the same, for some organisation this becomes an burning issue. As when organisations try to cut cost they first go for any expensive tools they have and as far as i know the pricing model and cost is on a higher end in datadog

Reasons for choosing Datadog

Ease of use, support, easy integrations, more insights and better observability

Reasons for switching to Datadog

Functionality, limited availabile option to monitor multiple lind of applications

Verified

Reviewer

Computer Software

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed December 2025

Best Tool for Application Insights and Bug Resolution

My team regularly used datadog. It allowed us to create alerts for different metrics like application errors, network latency, and more. Datadog was our go to for reading logs, determining production bugs and errors. Datadog also allowed us to see the actions our users were making when any error occurred, and the different services that our application was interacting with during that period. I would use datadog again without question.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Datadog was our go to tool for analytic insights about our application. We could filter application logs in a very helpful, and specific way that made it easy to identify, track, and resolve bugs and issues that came up during development. The security access into the application made it so we could control access with granularity. The cost for datadog was greatly outweighed by the value it provided for our team.

Cons:

Datadog is a very powerful tool, if you're looking for a simple tool this could be for you but it might be a little overkill for really simple projects.

Reasons for switching to Datadog

Our new client used datadog so we switched to match their tool set.

Giovanny J.

Verified reviewer

Biotechnology

501-1000 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Reviewed December 2025

Unified Observability That Scales, With Exceptional Support And Strong Business Impact

Datadog has become our single source of truth for observability across infrastructure, applications, and user experience. We realized faster incident triage, better cross‑team collaboration, and measurable improvements in application reliability and release velocity.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Single source of truth for observability across infrastructure, applications, and user experience. The platform offers metrics, logs, APM, tracing, RUM, synthetics, security monitoring, which paired with excellent out‑of‑the‑box integrations and a strong support organization.

Cons:

Learning curve for advanced features. Users that are new to observability may need enablement on correlating signals across products.

Reasons for choosing Datadog

Pricing / Licensing Transparent, modular pricing by product (APM, logs, synthetics, security, etc.), plus usage-based.

Wai Yip L.

Verified reviewer

Financial Services

201-500 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Reviewed December 2025

A Powerful Observability Platform with Premium Pricing

Overall, my experience with Datadog has been very positive. As a senior SRE, I rely on it daily for infrastructure visibility, performance tracking, and incident response. The platform is reliable, feature-rich, and continues to evolve with meaningful improvements. It has helped streamline on-call workflows and reduced mean time to resolution across multiple services. Aside from pricing concerns, it remains one of the most effective observability solutions I’ve worked with.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Datadog provides a comprehensive and unified observability platform that has been invaluable for maintaining the reliability of our systems. Its integration ecosystem is exceptional—most services we use can be connected with minimal effort. The dashboards are highly customizable and intuitive, making it easy to visualize key performance metrics. Log management, APM, and infrastructure monitoring work seamlessly together, which significantly improves incident detection and troubleshooting. The alerting capabilities are robust and flexible, enabling precise, noise-free monitoring.

Cons:

The primary downside is the cost. As our environment scales, Datadog becomes increasingly expensive, especially when ingesting large volumes of logs and metrics. Cost management requires constant attention, and certain features can become hard to justify purely from a pricing standpoint.

Reasons for choosing Datadog

During our evaluation process, we compared Datadog against Dynatrace, Splunk Enterprise, and Papertrail. Each platform had strengths, but Datadog ultimately provided the most balanced and mature observability solution for our needs. Dynatrace offered strong automatic discovery and topology features, but its learning curve and operational complexity were higher. The platform felt more rigid in how data was presented, whereas Datadog offered greater customization and flexibility in building dashboards, alerts, and workflows—important for an SRE-driven environment. Splunk Enterprise delivered excellent log analytics, but it required substantial infrastructure, tuning, and ongoing management to get the same level of real-time visibility that Datadog provides out of the box. Extending Splunk into full-stack observability required additional modules and overhead, making the operational cost and complexity less appealing. Papertrail was simple and effective for logs, but it lacked the breadth required for modern observability. It wasn’t designed to cover metrics, APM, distributed tracing, user experience monitoring, or Kubernetes-native insights—capabilities that have become essential for our environment. Datadog stood out because it integrates all core observability pillars—metrics, logs, traces, and real-user monitoring—into a single, cohesive platform without requiring separate tooling or significant operational overhead. Its cloud-native integrations, Kubernetes visibility, alerting flexibility, and ease of onboarding helped us accelerate adoption and improve incident response. Although cost remains a consideration, Datadog provided the strongest combination of capability, usability, and ecosystem maturity, making it the best fit for our long-term observability strategy.

Reasons for switching to Datadog

We transitioned from New Relic to Datadog primarily because Datadog offered broader observability coverage and deeper integration capabilities that aligned better with our evolving infrastructure. Datadog’s unified platform for metrics, logs, and APM provided a more cohesive experience compared to New Relic’s more segmented tooling. Additionally, Datadog’s out-of-the-box dashboards, cloud-native integrations, and Kubernetes visibility were significantly more mature, which reduced setup time and improved our ability to troubleshoot issues quickly. The alerting flexibility and correlation features in Datadog also gave us better operational insights, ultimately improving on-call efficiency. While New Relic served us well, Datadog’s ecosystem, extensibility, and end-to-end visibility made it a more effective solution for our SRE workflows.

Jad S.

Verified reviewer

Hospitality

201-500 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Reviewed December 2025

My experience with Datadog

Generally my experience is pretty good, I like the product and I feel like its a valuable tool for me to be able to do my job.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

In General: I like the customizability coupled with the ability to have a centralized place for most of our monitoring needs. I like that there were many cases where I needed a feature to do a task and was able to come up with a hack that enabled me to fulfill my task even though the feature was missing from datadog. Security: I like that we have centralized most of our security alerting through Datadog SIEM, it makes it easier for incident management. Value for Money: Datadog is well known for being expensive, but we try to balance cost vs value. Customer Support: Customer support is pretty good, documentation sometimes is lacking or old and good customer support compensate for that. Log Management: This maybe the best value about Datadog, log management / pipelines / generating metrics / etc are very powerful and are great tools Bugs and Issues: if this means bugs in Datadog, then yes I have faced a few but contacting customer support resolved most them. Data Analysis: Dashboards / Notebooks containing logs / metrics / events / network / etc makes Data Analysis for me easier and faster. Project Management: Don't have much to add in this area.

Cons:

What first comes to mind is cost, you have to actually need the feature to get approval for the cost associated with its price.

Reasons for choosing Datadog

Datadog had better features than all other alternatives. (Was not part of the decision, but this is what I was told)

Reasons for switching to Datadog

I was not a part of making the decision to switch, but I was a part in transferring monitoring from ELK stack to Datadog. ELK was internally hosted and used, it had many issues and a big outage before having the switch. Not sure of the actual causes behind the switch.

Prateek G.

Verified reviewer

Computer Software

201-500 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Reviewed December 2025

Datadog APM Database Monitoring is a must have if you're a DBRE

Overall from a DBRE perspective it has hit all the major observability checkpoints that were needed to monitor our databases. Time to respond to a database incident has really improved and we have more visibility into the systems

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

I work in Data Reliability and so far the best thing about Datadog has been its APM feature and the Postgres integration. I have been able to track issues before they could happen and it had been really useful during incidents

Cons:

The recent AI recommendations are sometimes not very useful. When a query is slow obviously the first recommendation would be to add indexes. For some reason the AI recommendation system does not check the indexes before recommending. To an engineer who doesn't have admin privileges to the Database, these recommendations might sound confusing and they would create tickets which gets marked as Won't Do

Reasons for switching to Datadog

We took a survey on used features from pganalyze and realized DBM had similar offering at similar prices. We did a trial with 5 instances and found it useful. Later we implemented it across 40 RDS instances and seen the value within organization

Tobias W.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

201-500 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Reviewed December 2025

Looking for a good one stop shop? Go for Datadog

If you want a solid solution, with constant updates and you have the budget for your all in one Observability platform, go they way with Datadog. You won’t regret it

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The wide range of services and excellent customer care from customer succes. If you compare it to other competitors, Datadog offers a better one stop show and one single pane of glass

Cons:

The pricing is quite steep compared to competitors. It’s diffidently not the most cheap product in terms of pricing.

Reasons for choosing Datadog

Single plane of glass. No switching between tabs all visible from one perspective and broad range of integrations.

Reasons for switching to Datadog

To get a single plane of glass from multi vendors instead of multiple Observability solutions.

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Datadog FAQs

What are the disadvantages of Datadog?
Based on user reviews, Datadog has a 4.1 out of 5 value for money rating. Users must pay based on their usage of the software; therefore, large organizations with complex networks may find it expensive. According to users, Datadog also has a significant learning curve, which can make it challenging to get up to speed quickly.
How much does Datadog cost?
Datadog offers a free infrastructure monitoring plan that supports up to five hosts and retains metrics for only a single day. Its paid infrastructure plans start at $15 per host (a system you're observing) per month and go up to $34 per host per month. You may have to pay more for additional features, such as add-ons and custom metrics.
Who uses Datadog?
Datadog is used across various industries by IT and development teams. It's also a solution for cloud architects, as it provides them with visibility into how assets are performing against expectations. Organizations with many distributed apps also turn to Datadog to centralize their performance management. Small to midsize businesses account for more than half of the Datadog reviews on our site.
What is unique about Datadog?
Datadog is unique in that it gives users a single solution for observing app performance, collecting logs, performing traces, and building granular analytics reports. It also comes with tools that use machine learning to detect anomalies, which can prevent serious problems from interrupting operations.