Features
- Infrastructure monitoring with 750+ integrations
- APM with distributed tracing
- Log management and analytics
- Real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic tests
Pros
- Most comprehensive observability platform available
- Unified view across infrastructure, APM, and logs
- Powerful dashboarding and alerting
Cons
- Expensive, especially at scale
- Complex pricing with per-host and per-feature charges
- Can be overwhelming with too many features
Overview
Datadog is the leading cloud-scale monitoring and observability platform. It provides a unified view of your entire stack: infrastructure metrics, application performance, logs, real user monitoring, and synthetic testing, all in a single platform with correlated data.
Datadog’s strength is its breadth. With 750+ integrations, it can monitor virtually any technology in your stack. Its APM provides distributed tracing across services, its log management ingests and analyzes logs at scale, and its infrastructure monitoring tracks server and container metrics.
The platform’s correlated data model lets you jump from a metric spike to the relevant traces to the specific logs, making it efficient to diagnose issues across complex distributed systems.
When to Use
Choose Datadog for organizations that need comprehensive observability across infrastructure, applications, and logs. It is the standard for medium-to-large engineering teams that can justify the cost. For smaller teams, consider Grafana Cloud or Sentry.
Getting Started
# Install the Datadog Agent
DD_API_KEY=your-api-key bash -c \
"$(curl -L https://install.datadoghq.com/scripts/install_script.sh)"