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
Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)
Score 6.7 out of 10
N/A
Visual Studio App Center was a solution used to build, test, release, and monitor mobile and desktop apps, as well as to continuously monitor real-time performance. The product was discontinued in March 2025, and is no longer available.
$40
per month per build concurrency
Pricing
Datadog
Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)
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
Builds
$40
per month per build concurrency
Standard Test Plan
$99
per month per build concurrency
Enterprise Test Plan
$499
per month per build concurrency
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Datadog
Visual Studio App Center (discontinued)
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
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 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.
Honestly, it's an all around solution that needs some enhancements. Need to build an app, check! Need to test that app, check! Need to debug that app, check! Visual Studio App Center is a well rounded platform for multiple types of builds and services.
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.
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
User management seems a bit disconnected from the standard Microsoft ecosystem. Almost feels like you are managing local users and sharing access more than an enterprise solution
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 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.
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.
The biggest benefit is in integrations and plug-ins, as well as the fact that it's not open source. I know open source is popular, but we have all been on the downside of open source and waiting for things to be voted up or a contribution to fix an issue. This alone makes VSAC a nice solution! Plus, it comes with a complete IDE integration of services, documentation, and is light weight
