Datadog

The user estimates that sending all service structured logs to Datadog under their current retention policy would nearly double their IT spend. They use Grafana, Loki, and ClickHouse instead, at under $100 per month.

The user describes Datadog’s pricing as excessive and says it is hard to find an alternative, so they continue using it despite dissatisfaction.

Metrics scraped from Prometheus were classified as custom unless they came from Datadog's agent, and the resulting costs could have increased the bill by 10x. The team reduced those metrics and switched to official agent metrics and configs.

Affects: Heavy telemetry users

Datadog’s per-host pricing is described as steering teams toward tracking infrastructure topology rather than user-facing behavior, leaving them with many dashboards but no quick answer about whether checkout is broken.

Affects: Teams using Datadog for monitoring

Teams may pay for services they rarely use when onboarding gaps prevent broader adoption, and lack time to follow up on spending recommendations. The commenter says Datadog can be expensive for a minimal set of benefits in that situation.

Affects: Teams using Datadog

The user wants self-hosting as an option but says their team lacks the redundant expertise to deploy and manage the systems, and hiring an additional FTE would be necessary.

Affects: The user's company team

The commenter wants a free alternative to Datadog and is surprised one is not available.

The Cloudflare Workers OpenTelemetry example uses a deprecated library and points to a replacement, prompting a request to update the documentation.

The user wants Datadog and other observability vendors to better support OpenTelemetry semantic conventions and rely less on vendor-specific agents.

The user wants Amazon Linux 3 to have official Datadog support as part of a refreshed, RHEL-compatible Amazon Linux release.

Affects: Teams running large fleets of EC2 instances

The user switched from Datadog to Grafana and describes Datadog pricing as a reason to leave.

The company said Datadog price increases and repeated sales pressure made the service more expensive than its highest-paid salaries. It switched to Prometheus and Grafana for similar functionality at a much lower cost.

Affects: Startup

The user is looking to replace Datadog and asks whether HyperDX offers a similar batch HTTP intake API for a quick transition.

The commenter prefers AWS logging and metrics because they see it as less expensive and less troublesome than Datadog, despite its less polished appearance.

The user considers Datadog a strong product but says its price is too high, so their team uses Grafana Cloud instead. They may consider SigNoz later if they have time to migrate.

Affects: The user's team