13 Best Datadog Competitors and Alternatives In 2024

Founded in 2010, Datadog has become one of the most popular monitoring and security systems. It allows businesses to efficiently track performance metrics, implement cloud-based services, and monitor every aspect of the infrastructure.

Since the platform is integrated with tons of tools and features, its pricing structure is more suitable for large enterprises. For small and medium-sized businesses, there are many great alternatives available at attractive prices.

Below, we have compiled a list of the best Datadog competitors and alternatives based on ease of use, features offered, and developers’ experience. This will help you evaluate different platforms in terms of integration, deployment, specific product capabilities, and customer service and support.

9. Instana

Price: Starts at $75 per month per host | 14-day free trial available
Released in
2015

Rating: 8.8/10 from 450+ customers

IBM Instana is an enterprise application performance monitoring platform that helps you improve apps’ performance and (CI/CD) pipelines no matter where apps reside — on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, or hybrid cloud.

The platform can gather millions of metrics from all components in high fidelity with one-second data granularity. It then organizes the collected data into dependency relationships, the Dynamic Graph, while regularly modeling the infrastructure and services.

Instana applies proprietary machine learning and preset health rules to determine the health of each component. It then creates “issues” for all unhealthy components, while incidents are only generated when users are affected by those unhealthy components.

These incidents include metrics, logged errors, configuration data, traces, and exceptions. They help you identify the root cause of the problem.

Key Features 

  • Serverless and end-user monitoring
  • Historical data and root cause analysis
  • Intelligent alerts based on automatic or manually configured baselines
  • Pre-configured dashboards based on performance indicators

Moreover, the platform gives you the flexibility to filter every aspect of your data in countless ways, making it easier to discover uniquely tagged traces, problem patterns, and performance outliers.

As for pricing, Instana offers two plans: Self-hosted (which costs $93.80 per month per host) and SaaS (which costs $75 per month per host). Both are fully featured and support an unlimited number of users.

8. Zabbix

Price: Free
Released in
2001

Rating: 8.6/10 from 500+ customers

Zabbix is an open-source distributed monitoring platform designed to analyze the performance and availability of network devices, servers, cloud services, and other IT resources.

It is an all-in-one monitoring solution that allows businesses of all sizes to collect, store, analyze, and manage data received from IT infrastructure. It can handle millions of metrics gathered from tens of thousands of network devices, servers, and virtual machines, efficiently scaling to even larger environments.

Besides just monitoring infrastructure, Zabbix can provide different levels of monitoring services in a multi-tenant environment. Admins can change permissions and roles to isolate users, create unique dashboards to provide specific insights, and generate and send custom scheduled reports to users.

Key Features 

  • Powerful data visualization
  • Predicts trends and detects anomalies
  • Gives alerts on critical issues
  • Enterprise-grade security

And since Zabbix is an open-source platform released under the GNU General Public License version 2, it offers several benefits that you won’t find with proprietary tools.

For example, you can always perform internal audits to see if Zabbix code aligns with your internal security policies. Avoid vendor lock-in and modify, add, or remove functionality as per your business requirements.

7. Sumo Logic

Price: Essential version starts at $80 per GB | Free version and a 30-day free trial available 
Founded in
2010

Rating: 8.2/10 from 450+ customers

Sumo Logic is designed for companies of all sizes to address the data challenges presented by digital transformation, cloud computing, and modern applications. It automates the collection and analysis of applications, security, infrastructure, and IoT data, so business owners can gain valuable insights within seconds and make informed decisions.

Its patented technology (named LogReduce and LogCompare) finds and predicts anomalies in real time and uncovers the root causes of identified problems.

You can easily boil down hundreds of log lines into recognizable patterns, isolate signals from the noise, detect abnormal behavior, and leverage standard benchmarks of popular stacks (like Kubernetes and Apache) to optimize your applications.

Key Features 

  • Powerful and intuitive query-based analytics
  • Prioritize and investigate security issues
  • Ensure compliance readiness and security best practices
  • One-click integrations with Azure, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform services

Sumo Logic also makes it easy to identify potential security threats across users, databases, devices, networks, and IPs. It uses proprietary algorithms to accelerate threat detection at cloud scales. Whether you are summarizing vast amounts of data or digging into specific apps, it’s fast and efficient to gain insights into active security threats.

The platform is trusted by more than 2,100 companies, including Airbnb, Alaska, BlueJeans, RazorPay, Toyota, Gumgum, and HootSuite.

6. Checkmk

Price: Enterprise version starts at $80 per month | Free version (with limited features) is available 
Founded in
2008

Rating: 9.1/10 from 200+ customers

Checkmk offers a suite of tools to monitor networks, servers, and applications. These tools have been developed in collaboration with customers over several years. They are simple, user-friendly, and powerful enough for intricate IT environments.

The platform gives you detailed insights into your network, including in-depth views of traffic, packets, ports, and peers. Gather valuable metrics across heterogeneous infrastructure while avoiding unreliable, third-party plugins. Monitor the health of individual applications to see which one is not functioning properly or not scaled well.

It also handles the complexity of Kubernetes. You can easily navigate through clusters with interconnected context-sensitive dashboards. There is no need to fine-tune any parameters. Pre-designed dashboards show you everything in a single pane.

Key Benefits 

  • Quick deployment (start monitoring within 10 minutes)
  • Requires fewer resources on both client-side and server-side
  • Automated monitoring for dynamic infrastructures
  • Maintain over 2,000+ plugins

Checkmk is available in two editions — an open-source edition named Raw (which is completely free) and an enterprise edition (which comes with auto-discovery, agent management, reporting, and other advanced features).

5. Coralogix

Price: Starts at $0.60 per GB ingested 
Founded in
2014

Rating: 8.4/10 from 100+ customers

With Coralogix, you can analyze and monitor the entire data of your infrastructure in a single, centralized platform. Add data from any source, in any format, for extensive event correlation and streamlined troubleshooting.

The platform clusters millions of log records into specific patterns and identifies connections between those patterns, helping businesses understand their data and proactively solve their problems.

More specifically, it can parse, and transform data on the fly, produce metrics from raw logs without indexing, and cluster noisy logs into templates.

Key Stats

  • 2,000+ Global customers
  • 10,000+ DevOps and Engineering Users
  • 500,000+ Application monitored
  • 3,000,000 Events processed per second

The platform also takes care of your cloud environment’s security and compliance. It continuously monitors systems for potential weaknesses and known security vulnerabilities to be fixed. Plus, the automated posture assessments ensure that your systems follow best practices and compliance standards (HIPAA, ISO, PCI, SOC, NIST, etc.)

As for pricing, you are charged for what you use. When it comes to data analysis, monitoring, and alerting, Coralogix charges you $0.60 per GB ingested. For lightning-fast queries or business-critical data, it charges $1.80 per GB.

4. LogicMonitor

Price: Based on business requirements | Volume discounts available | Free trial available 
Founded in
2007

Rating: 8.7/10 from 600+ customers

LogicMonitor is an agentless SaaS-based monitoring platform that comprehensively analyzes infrastructures, from on-premises to the cloud. No matter what business you are in, it makes it easier to forecast utilization, detect anomalies, and identify performance issues before they affect the revenue.

The platform is integrated with tons of tools to visualize networks and troubleshoot issues faster. It can auto-discover over 2,500 network devices manufactured by top brands like Juniper, Cisco, and Meraki.

Then, you can drill down into individual interfaces, firewalls, switches, routers, load balancers, and wireless devices on the network. The dashboard gives you a detailed report on network performance and helps you pinpoint bandwidth issues and performance bottlenecks.

Key Features 

  • Monitor critical database metrics like active connections, throughput, and query execution performance
  • Log analysis to further reduce MTTR
  • Intelligently predicts performance levels and alerts you when those thresholds are exceeded

One of its unique systems, called “Dynamic Thresholds,” utilizes advanced anomaly detection models to determine a resource’s expected range based on past performance. It then alerts you when something falls out of this range. It tracks all important metric values, metric rate of change, and metric patterns.

Overall, LogicMonitor shows you only what you need, right when you need it. According to the company, its in-depth reporting and real-time alerts can reduce Mean Time To Repair (MTTR) by 40%.

3. AppDynamics

root cause analysis tools -AppDynamics

Price: Starts at $6 per month per CPU core | Free trial available 
Founded in
2008

Rating: 8.3/10 from 500+ customers

AppDynamics focuses on managing the performance and availability of apps across data centers, network architecture, IT infrastructure, cloud computing environments, application security, and threat detection.

In 2017, Cisco acquired AppDynamics for $3.7 billion. And since then, it has become a key driver in the Cisco products portfolio, offering innovative services to meet the demands of digital companies.

The platform makes it easier for its customer to measure crucial business metrics (like conversions and return on investment) and resolve issues before they affect sales.

One can locate the root cause of issues in real time, from third-party APIs down to code-level issues. View how applications rely on external networks to quickly resolves issues with DNS, ISP, or SaaS providers.

Key Benefits

  • Provides complete visibility into all components of your app ecosystem
  • Instant root-case analysis
  • Automated actions to optimize your application environment
  • Isolate network issues across third-party networks and SaaS

Cisco’s RASP (short for runtime application self-protection) solution keeps both users and digital business safe by defending against malicious programs. It automatically blocks threats in real-time, safeguarding customer data, organizational IP, and brand equity.

The platform is widely used in enterprise SaaS applications and public sectors (from manufacturing and telecommunication to financial and healthcare industry) for full-stack observability and IT infrastructure monitoring.

2. New Relic

Price: Free for up to 100 GB data ingest per month | $0.30 per GB beyond free limits
Founded in
2008

Rating: 8.6/10 from 2,000+ customers

With New Relic, you can monitor your entire stack within minutes. It provides historical and real-time insights into the performance and reliability of mobile and web applications. These insights help you respond faster, optimize better, and develop more perfect apps.

The platform utilizes a standardized application performance index score to determine and rate app performance across the infrastructure. It gives you a 360-degree view of apps, from frontend user devices to backend APIs.

You can visualize dependencies with automaps, drill into errors to quickly identify root causes, diagnose cluster behavior, and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks.

And since everything on New Relic runs on the world’s most efficient telemetry database, you can instantly slice and dice complex data into flexible visualization. The platform gives you the power to analyze over 50 billion events in a single query, with each query having an amazing response time of 60 milliseconds.

Key Features

  • External services performance monitoring
  • Business transaction monitoring
  • Detailed dashboards bring data together
  • Quick anomaly detection and root cause integration

New Relic partners with dozens of popular SaaS providers, including Azure, AWS, IBM Bluemix, Engine Yard, CloudBees, as well as mobile app backend service providers StackMob, Parse, and Appcelerator.

As for pricing, you only pay for what you use ($0.30 per Gigabyte). There are no hidden costs, surprise overages, or blind spots from sampling data.

1. Dynatrace

Dynatrace

Price: $74 per month for full-stack monitoring | 15-day free trial available 
Founded in
2005

Rating: 8.8/10 from 1,600+ customers

Dynatrace combines advanced AIOps with deep observability and continuous runtime application security to provide accurate answers and intelligent automation from data. This allows businesses to automate and modernize cloud operations and deliver applications more securely while ensuring flawless digital experiences.

The platform can efficiently monitor all infrastructure, including containers, servers, virtual machines, networks, cloud storage, and more. It offers advanced observability across the Platform as a Service (PaaS) and container technologies like OpenShift, Kubernetes, Azure, AWS, and Cloud Foundry.

The Business Analytics tool makes it easy to analyze mobile and web conversions, customer segmentation, and revenue impact. You can pull in additional data from 30+ third-party services, including Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, to make informed decisions.

Key Benefits 

  • One-click integration with web analytics
  • Offers deep code-level visibility
  • Includes 200+ custom metrics per host for technology data integration
  • AI assistance with precise root cause determination

The platform seamlessly integrates with more than 620 technologies, including Docker, Java, Prometheus, AWS, Azure, and various open-source frameworks.

While it’s an all-in-one platform, you can purchase individual modules as per your business requirements. For example, the digital experience monitoring system (which starts at $11 per month) helps you to optimize user experiences across IoT devices. The application security system (which costs $15 per month) lets you detect runtime application vulnerabilities and optimize for the cloud and Kubernetes.

Other Equally Good Datadog Alternatives

10. SolarWinds

Price: Different tools have different pricing plans | 30-day free trial available 
Founded in
1999

Rating: 8.7/10 from 5,000+ customers

SolarWinds is one of the most popular monitoring, observability, and service management platforms. It can seamlessly integrate with your critical business services to provide complete visibility and control of your infrastructure.

Its network management tools, for example, can monitor device performance, analyze traffic and bandwidth, and provide insights into network faults, network availability, and IP address management in a single console.

AppOptics, a SaaS-based application monitoring tool, gives you full-stack visibility and allows you to identify the root cause of performance issues. You can drill down into performance and resource utilization by processes, containers, and services.

Upgrade your system with a cloud-based intelligent ticketing system, knowledge base and portal, as well as secure remote support.

SolarWinds has more than 300,000 clients, including 498 of Fortune 500 companies and many federal agencies.

11. Prometheus

Price: Free 
Released in
2012

Rating: 8.6/10 from 100+ customers

Prometheus gathers metrics from configured targets at specific intervals, evaluates rule expressions, shows results, and can trigger alerts when certain conditions are met.

This open-source platform is performant and simple to run. It seamlessly integrates into the infrastructure, allowing you to track system health, behavior, and performance.

The features that distinguish Prometheus from other monitoring tools are:

  • Time-series multidimensional data model
  • PromQL (query language) leverages the multidimensional data model
  • All individual server nodes remain autonomous
  • Numerous types of dashboards and graphs
  • Many client libraries and integration options

Written in Go programming language, its source code is available on GitHub under the Apache 2 License.

12. Splunk

Price: Starts at $15 per month per host | Free trial available  
Released in
2003

Rating: 8.5/10 from 2,100+ customers

Splunk makes it easier to search, visualize, and analyze the machine-generated data gathered from apps, websites, sensors, and devices. It can analyze massive amounts of data and detect the signal from the noise faster, at scale.

Its proprietary schema-on-read technology enables you to extract answers from unstructured data and add structure on the fly. The full-fidelity data coverage and machine learning models give the real-time insights you need to enhance workflow and effectively scale operations.

All in all, Splunk is a flexible and scalable platform that can be used to solve almost any case. You can rely on 13,000+ active members and 1,800+ experts and leverage over 2,800 apps (available on Splunkbase) to build custom applications tuned to your specific business requirements.

Splunk has more than 7,500 employees and received over 1,020 patents to date. In 2022, the company hit a milestone by exceeding $3 billion in annual revenue, a 26% increase year-over-year.

13. Sentry

Price: Starts at $26 per month | Free version available 
Released in
2011

Rating: 8.8/10 from 200+ customers

Designed for developers, Sentry is an open-source performance monitoring and error-tracking platform. It shows what’s causing the problem, down to the line of code.

The platform is quite easy to implement. You can set it up with just 5 lines of code — no agents or professional services are required. Once everything is set up, Sentry will automatically start gathering device information.

Within an hour, you will see how fast your application starts, which process is consuming excessive resources, how well your application is performing on real-user devices.

Since Sentry has founded on open-source principles, you will find almost all of the code (that powers sentry.io) on GitHub. It is loved by 3.5 million developers and 85,000 organizations across the world.

Their most popular customers include Microsoft, GitHub, VMware, Disney, Atlassian, Autodesk, Cloudflare, and Reddit.

More To Know

How big is Datadog?

Headquartered in New York City, Datadog has 11 offices located throughout the United States, 18 in Europe/Middle East, and 4 in Asia/Pacific. They employ over 3,200 people combined.

The company went public in 2019, raising $648 million by selling 24 million shares. In 2022, it generated annual revenue of $1.36 billion, a 78.7% increase year-over-year.

Who uses Datadog?

Datadog serves more than 1,000 companies in different industries, from computing and hardware to finance and real estate. Samsung, Sony, Siemens, Lenovo, The Washington Post, FICO, Asana, Harvard Medical School, Comcast, 21st Century Fox, Whole Foods Market, and Nasdaq are some of its biggest clients.

The Best Network Monitoring Tools

If you are looking for network monitoring platforms to track and manage your devices, these are the best options available in the market:

  1. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
  2. Atera
  3. Paessler PRTG Network Monitor
  4. Site24x7 Network Monitoring
  5. ManageEngine OpManager
  6. Domotz
  7. HelpSystems Intermapper
  8. Progress WhatsUp Gold
  9. Nagios XI
What’s the future of AIOps Platforms Look Like?

Artificial Intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) combines human intelligence with automated algorithms to provide a 360-degree view of IT systems. It has become vital for tracing, analyzing, and managing modern IT infrastructures that are componentized,  distributed, dynamic, and hybrid. 

According to the Grand View Research report, the market size of AIOps platforms will exceed $33.80 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 17.7% from 2022 to 2030.

Why You Can Trust Us?

We thoroughly analyzed 25 Datadog alternatives and read customers’ reviews. It took more than 24 hours to do the comprehensive research. Finally, we decided to shortlist the 13 platforms based on their features, pricing structure, and ease of use.

Our “Rating” is the average of all ratings given by genuine customers on trusted review websites. In order to show you the true picture, we haven’t considered the reviews and testimonials featured on the product’s official website.

We DO NOT earn commission from any of the featured platforms. Moreover, we have two separate editors who have no influence over our listing criteria or recommendations.

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Written by
Varun Kumar

I am a professional technology and business research analyst with more than a decade of experience in the field. My main areas of expertise include software technologies, business strategies, competitive analysis, and staying up-to-date with market trends.

I hold a Master's degree in computer science from GGSIPU University. If you'd like to learn more about my latest projects and insights, please don't hesitate to reach out to me via email at [email protected].

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