Datadog Logs
Expensive log management at scale, but if you're already on Datadog for metrics/APM, keeping logs there avoids running yet another tool.
What is Datadog Logs?
Datadog Logs is the log management product within the broader Datadog observability platform, letting you collect, search, and alert on log data alongside metrics, traces, and APM in one place. It ingests logs from your infrastructure, applications, and cloud services, indexes them for fast search, and lets you build dashboards and alerts that correlate log events with the rest of your Datadog telemetry. The value is specifically in that correlation, not the log search itself.
Key features
- Unified search across logs, metrics, and traces without switching between separate tools
- Log pipelines for parsing, enriching, and routing logs before they're indexed
- Configurable retention and indexing rules so you only pay to index what you actually need to search
- Alerting and monitors built directly on log-based queries
- Wide range of integrations for pulling logs from cloud providers, containers, and common frameworks
Who it's for
Teams already running Datadog for infrastructure or application monitoring who want logs in the same place rather than standing up a separate tool like a self-hosted ELK stack or a point solution like Better Stack. If you're not already on Datadog, its per-GB indexing costs make it a hard tool to justify adopting for logs alone.
Pricing
Usage-based, priced per GB of log data ingested and indexed, with retention length affecting cost. It's known for getting expensive at scale, so log volume and retention settings are worth tuning deliberately rather than left on defaults.