Datadog Pricing: Get the details on 2024 pricing

Intro

While Datadog is an established monitoring and analytics platform, many find that Datadog costs can escalate quickly and unpredictably. If you are looking to optimize your full-stack observability without inflating your budget, understanding the many nuances of Datadog pricing is essential. 

Let’s take a look at Datadog’s pricing model as well as explore a cost-effective alternative so you can confidently focus on what truly matters – your service’s performance and reliability, not the unpredictability of your Datadog bill.

Datadog pricing: How it works

When it comes to observability, complex pricing is not a good thing as it translates into poor price transparency. This inevitably leads to expensive overages. Complex pricing also creates a culture of fear, where technology teams are hesitant to use much needed services as they might exceed budget constraints. 

Let’s take a look at some of the factors that contribute to Datadog’s complex pricing structure:

Datadog has different pricing structures and tiers per service

To start, Datadog offers a broad range of tools each with their dizzying array of pricing structures. Here are some examples:

Datadog pushes bundled services

Some Datadog services can only be purchased if you already are an existing customer for another service. For example, you can only purchase Database Monitoring if you are an Infrastructure Monitoring customer. This conditional service offering potentially forces you to pay for features you don’t want or need.

Datadog data retention and rehydration

Longer data retention leads to higher Datadog costs forcing you to choose which data you can easily access and which needs to be archived. Furthermore, if you need to rehydrate data, this entails an additional cost of $1.70 per million log events, per month. Learn more about Coralogix’s Remote Querying vs. Datadog’s Flex Logs.

Datadog agent-based pricing complexity

The pricing for Datadog’s proprietary agents monitoring your systems can become complex, as it may vary depending on the type of data they collect and the frequency of collection.

Datadog overages and on-demand pricing

Datadog prices often reflect annual commitment. Without this upfront commitment or in situations where you exceed your data or host limit, you may need to pay on-demand pricing for overages which can be very expensive. 

Datadog support costs

Datadog’s standard support, while free, is limited to business hours for non-critical issues. If you want 24/7 support for general issues, you need to pay 8% of your monthly spend with a minimum of $2,000 per month. So if you spend $200,000 annually on Datadog, you will need to shell out another $16,000 just for 24/7 support.

Datadog pricing per host punishes microservice architecture

In the realm of microservices, services are typically spread across various hosts to enhance scalability and resilience. For Datadog’s infrastructure monitoring, their per-host pricing model doesn’t differentiate between large and small, active and inactive hosts. As such, the cumulative expense can potentially be exorbitant. This can create a situation where the cost of Datadog infrastructure monitoring is greater than the actual infrastructure expenditure itself.

Why is Datadog so expensive

In summary, with Datadog you pay for ingestion, you pay for retention, you pay for high performance indexing, you pay to archive, you pay to reindex, and you pay additional amounts for each and every individual service. Observability that is supposed to help you drive greater operational and cost efficiency, actually turns out to do the exact opposite.

See an additional analysis of Datadog pricing

Cost-effective observability with Coralogix

With Coralogix full-stack observability, you only pay for the data ingested and processed. Our unique in-stream analysis empowers you to query and analyze all your data (logs, traces, metrics, security events) as well as generate alerts and insights without indexing and hot storage. The simplicity of our pricing model creates transparency and predictability so you can better manage your data and avoid overages.

Coralogix’s TCO optimizer enables you to choose the most efficient and cost-effective way to store and process your logs, metrics and traces while enjoying access to all our services and features. Many Coralogix customers have moved most of their data to low-cost archive storage with our built-in data routing and rapid querying of unstructured data stored in archive, directly from the Coralogix UI.

Coralogix is also open source-friendly so you can continue working with your preferred shipping agents. Additionally data is stored in open source Parquet so there is zero vendor lock-in.

It’s important to note that there are no costs for querying data. Additionally, Coralogix provides 24/7 support with an average 1 minute response time and an average resolution time of 1 hour, for no extra cost.

Below is the Coralogix pricing calculator and our straightforward pricing model for full-stack observability.

Coralogix Pricing for Logs, Traces and Metrics

Logs

Traces

Metrics

Metrics, due to their lightweight nature can be queried at lightning speed with infinite retention at just $0.05 per GB.

Coralogix Pricing Calculator