Datadog Pricing
If you are stuck in a lift with a group of English people you can break the ice by mentioning the weather. If you were stuck in the same list with a group of observability professionals the topic would probably be Datadog costs. It seems to be an question that everybody knows about and everybody has an opinion on.
Whilst many vendors charge on the basis of volumes of ingestion of the the three main signals, Datadog take a different approach. With the exception of logging, Datadog pricing is based on functional units. Even APM itself is an optional module. The pricing for a number of these modules tends to be host-based. For many people this is a turn off, since an individual microservice or web app can be counted as a host - which means that monitoring a highly distributed system can be very expensive.
Datadog has essentially three types of charge for logging:
Unlike most vendors, Datadog completely separate Ingestion from Retention. The charge for ingestion of 1GB of Logs is separate to the charge for storing those logs. In practical terms, it does not make sense to ingest logs if you can't retain them for at least some minimal duration, but in conceptual terms the distinction is valid. On the basis of our sample, one log event equated to around 1.2kb. This in turn means that 1GB of logs equates to approx 830,000 log events. On this basis, ingesting 100GB of logs per month would cost $10. Retaining those logs for 15 days would cost .83 * 100 * 1.70 - a total of $141.10. So the total cost of ingestion and retention would be $151.10. Datadog does boast some sophisticated log pipelining functionality for routing and filtering log data.
Infrastructure monitoring is billed on a per host basis - where a host is described as:
any physical or virtual OS instance that you monitor with Datadog. It could be a server, VM, node (in the case of Kubernetes) or App Service Plan instance (in the case of Azure App Services).There are two pricing tiers for Infrastructure hosting - Pro and Enterprise - the prices in our estimator are based on the Pro Tier
Like infrastructure, APM is also charged on a per host basis. APM has three different pricing levels: Standard, Pro and Enterprise. The prices in our estimator are based on the Pro Tier.
NB: If you subscribe to APM for a host, then you must also subscribe to Infrastructure monitoring for that host.
USM is also priced on a per host model. There is only one pricing tier for USM
Datadog services are billed either annually or on demand. There tends to be a significant price saving by taking an out an annual contract
Multi-Year and Volume discounts are available on most Datadog products.
Datadog is a sophisticated, full spectrum observability platform. In this guide we have only covered the modules for core observability functionality. For more detailed pricing information, visit the Datadog pricing page.
