Glossary · Hosting & DevOps
Datadog
Overview
What Datadog is
Datadog is a SaaS observability platform. Lightweight agents installed on your servers, containers, and cloud accounts stream telemetry to Datadog, where it's unified into dashboards, alerts, and searches. With more than 900 built-in integrations, it connects to AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, databases, and third-party services out of the box, giving one place to answer 'is the system healthy, and if not, why?'
The core modules
Datadog is organized into modules you enable as needed: Infrastructure Monitoring (metrics from hosts and containers), APM (distributed tracing for application performance), Log Management, Real User Monitoring and Synthetics for frontend experience, and security products. Each is priced separately—typically per host per month or per gigabyte of data—so controlling volume and retention is part of running it cost-effectively.
How an agency applies Datadog
On backend, full-stack, and app modernization projects, we use Datadog to set service-level objectives, build dashboards the client can actually read, and route alerts to the right on-call channel. As part of maintenance and support, correlated metrics, traces, and logs turn a vague 'the app feels slow' complaint into a specific, fixable bottleneck—often a database query or an overloaded container.
Where we use it
Related Zen in Tech services
How our team puts Datadog to work in real projects.
FAQ
Datadog — common questions
How much does Datadog cost?
Datadog is priced per module—for example, per host per month for infrastructure monitoring and per gigabyte for logs. Costs can climb quickly at scale, so tuning data retention and which telemetry you collect matters.
Is Datadog just an APM tool?
No. APM (application performance monitoring) is one module. Datadog also covers infrastructure metrics, log management, real user monitoring, synthetic tests, and security, which is the point of a unified observability platform.
Datadog vs Sentry: which do I need?
Datadog gives broad, system-wide observability across infrastructure and applications; Sentry focuses on developer error tracking and debugging. If you must choose one, pick by your biggest gap—many teams eventually use both.
Need Datadog done right?
Book a free consultation and we’ll map the fastest, most cost-effective path for your project.
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