Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$18
per month per host
PagerDuty
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) provides digital operations management. Serving organizations of all sizes, PagerDuty aims to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers, every time.
$25
per month per user
Pricing
Datadog
PagerDuty
Editions & Modules
Log Management
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Infrastructure
$15.00
per month (billed annually) per host
Standard
$18
per month per host
Enterprise
$27
per month per host
DevSecOps Pro
$27
per month per host
APM
$31.00
per month (billed annually) per host
DevSecOps Enterprise
$41
per month per host
Professional
$25
per month per user
Business
$49
per month per user
Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Datadog
PagerDuty
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Discount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
Datadog is an all in one solution. It has everything in one place so you don't have to go from application to application and try to figure out what exactly happened. No more stitching database errors from one third party to backend errors in another to front end errors in …
Datadog empowers us to create dashboards and visualize the state of our infrastructure in real time. It gives us control over what we want to view and how. The graphs provide deep insight into trends and anamoly detectives. These features are lacking in some of the other …
After evaluating these two products PagerDuty proved to be the best as PagerDuty met all of our organizations requirements when it came to pricing, functionality, and reliability. We liked that PagerDuty came prebuilt with numerous integrations as that helps us grow out our …
PagerDuty seemed to have a much more flexible setup that allowed the organization to build and manage how we respond to alerts and incidents. The ServiceNow product seemed to be a bit more rigid.
PagerDuty has matched our expectations so far in terms of the quality and quantity of functionalities offered to manage incidents effectively. Other tools being considered during the purchase phase were quite expensive and failed to offer the features we required. They had …
PagerDuty's focus on escalation policies and schedules shows that the responders are most important. Other tools focus more on the data and technical information and therewith do not match our needs as well as PagerDuty does. We still use Icinga and other tools to recognize …
I did an evaluation of OpsGenie and found PagerDuty to be more intuitive and at the time PagerDuty had more integrations. I also really believe in PagerDuty's ability to keep an extremely high uptime for their application. Over the last 5 years very few issues and 0 lengthy …
Datadog and PagerDuty are two IT tools that complement each other to help DevOps teams identify and address IT incidents. Datadog is an IT infrastructure monitoring tool, while PagerDuty is an IT alert management tool that helps drive DevOps workflows and incident response processes. Both tools are most commonly used by midsize to large businesses and enterprises.
Datadog and PagerDuty do not compete with each other directly, but they instead complement each other’s capabilities. They both operate in the IT incident management space, but serve different purposes. Datadog handles the initial monitoring processes, while PagerDuty handles incident alerts, escalation, and response workflows. Together, they provide a more comprehensive environment for identifying and responding to a range of IT issues.
Features
Both Datadog and PagerDuty have distinct capabilities and advantages to using each product. They can also be integrated to automate monitoring and alerts across both systems. This allows information to sync across both tools to keep all teams up to date.
On an individual level, Datadog stands out as a one-stop monitoring shop across the business’s IT stack. Reviewers highlight its ability to effectively monitor application performance and server metrics. The tool is very customizable to serve a wide range of more niche monitoring cases.
In contrast, PagerDuty is a leader in alert management, particularly when organizations scale up their alerts and escalation rules. Reviewers praise PagerDuty’s support for configuring escalation rules to meet business needs. It also makes managing alert rules and policies easier as the number of necessary alerts grow with a business’s scale.
Limitations
Each product does have some limitations worth keeping in mind.
Datadog is known for coming with a heavy learning curve, which can make implementation and adoption a more difficult process. It also lacks sufficient documentation for training and learning the system.
PagerDuty’s mobile application is its most commonly criticized feature. The mobile app is much more limited than the desktop version. It does not have the capabilities to function as an administrative portal, which limits the flexibility and usability of the tool “in the field.”
Pricing
Datadog offers a wide range of pricing models based on specific capabilities. Each use case is priced separately, usually on a per-month basis and scaling by events, hosts, or other relevant volume measurements. Feature pricing can range from $5/volume/month to $30/volume/month.
PagerDuty offers 5 different plans, each tier adding functionalities on the lower-tier plan:
The Free plan provides on-call scheduling, unlimited API calls, and always-up service for up to 5 users.
The Starter plan, at $10/user/month for up to 6 users, ads unlimited domestic text notifications and escalation policies, as well as a historical year of data access and email/chat support.
The Team plan, at $29/user/month, adds unlimited global phone/text notifications, more integrates, response orchestration, and a status dashboard.
The Business plan, at $39/user/month, adds SSO and advanced permissions, advanced integrations, unlimited data access, and phone support.
The Digital Operations plan, priced by quote from the vendor, provides a suite of add-on products, more automation, event management, analytics, and a visibility console.
Datadog may be better suited for teams that have a more out-of-the-box infrastructure, on the primary platforms Datadog supports. You may also have better results if you have a bigger team dedicated to devops and/or a bigger budget. We found that trying to adapt it to our use case (small team, .NET on AWS Fargate) wasn't feasible. We continually ran into roadblocks that required us to dig through documentation (and at times, having to figure out some documentation was wrong), go back and forth with support, and in my opinion, waste money on excessive and unintended usages due to opaque pricing models and inaccurate usage reports, as well as broken/non-functional rate sampling controls.
PagerDuty is well-suited for teams or companies that need immediate response, such as production outages, server downtime, failed deployments, API failures, or critical infrastructure alerts. For example, if any company is doing work that requires immediate attention to any problem that arises due to a delay, it means the company loses money; PagerDuty would be the best fit for that company.
The thing which Datadog does really well, one of them are its broad range of services integrations and features which makes it one step observability solution for all. We can monitor all types of our application, infrastructure, hosts, databases etc with Datadog.
Its custom dashboard feature which helps us to visualize the data in a better way . It supports different types of charts through those charts we can create our dashboard more attractive.
Its AI powered alerting capability though that we can easily identify the root cause and also it has a low noise alerting capability which means it correlated the similar type of issues.
PagerDuty feels like something you can absolutely rely on... because in the rarest case where an alert is not acknowledged by the relevant agent, the alert automatically is escalated to our TL, which saves any possible errors or misses.
In terms of integration, I would rate it a 9.4 as it's absolutely seamless with Microsoft Teams or emails, ultimately resulting in a reduction of errors in work, which I greatly appreciate about PagerDuty.
In some cases, when an account requires input from multiple agents, PagerDuty makes sure to notify each of the relevant ones.
Other than this, sometimes when we have new joinings, it becomes easy for us to train them because every alert or response is recorded or logged. Because of this feature, we are able to check our past actions as well, so that a good feature about PagerDuty.
Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame
There are so many features that it can be hard to figure out where you need to go for your own use case. For example, RUM monitoring us buried in a "Digital Experience" sidebar setting when this is one of our key use cases that I sometimes struggle to find in the application. It appears that ECS + Fargate monitoring was recently released which is great because we had to build a lambda reporting solution for ephemeral task monitoring. But this new feature was never on my radar until I starting clicking around the application.
The UI is more complex than I would like. Part of the challenge is that most users use PagerDuty infrequently; I don't remember how I changed a policy last time. Another part of the challenge is that some users expect alerting to be a trivial feature, and are reluctant to invest any time in reading the documentation.
The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.
PagerDuty is reliable and easy to set up. It gives an effective way to notify the team about critical incidents which results in a faster turnaround time on issues. users can customize their alerts rules based on their preferences. Overall it's effective and easy to use which adds great business value.
Our logs are very important, and Datadog manages them exceptionally well. We frequently use Datadog services for our investigations. Use case: Monitor your apps, infrastructure, APIs, and user experience.
Key features:
Logs, metrics, and APM (Application Performance Monitoring)
Real-time alerting and dashboards
Supports Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, and other integrations
RUM (Real User Monitoring) and Synthetics
✅ Best for backend, server, and distributed systems monitoring.
I have not use the 2 technologies for as long as I have used PagerDuty but in my opinion PagerDuty makes things a lot easier. The other tools got the job done and got alerts out but PagerDuty just seemed to make the setup for on-call alert schedules and integrations easier than the others. This isn't to say the others are difficult, just that PagerDuty was slightly better. I also have noticed that more tools have options to integrate to PagerDuty over the other tools.