Enter your telemetry usage and compare costs using Datadog and Grafana Cloud published pricing — plus New Relic, Splunk, Elastic, SigNoz, and self-hosted on AWS, Azure, and GCP. No signup. No sales pitch.
Sample cost comparisons (static tables)
Pre-rendered monthly estimates for common infrastructure profiles. These tables are available without JavaScript for search engines, AI crawlers, and no-JS clients. All figures use published list pricing — use the interactive calculator to customize your stack.
Result: Elastic Serverless from $54/mo to Dynatrace at $1,574/mo — up to 97% ($1,520/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $1,200/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Small team
Result: Elastic Serverless from $209/mo to AWS CloudWatch at $4,986/mo — up to 96% ($4,777/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $2,500/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Mid-size SaaS
Result: Elastic Serverless from $1,506/mo to Dynatrace at $29,956/mo — up to 95% ($28,450/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $4,000/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Enterprise
Result: Elastic Serverless from $1,123/mo to AWS CloudWatch at $20,982/mo — up to 95% ($19,859/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $4,000/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Kubernetes-heavy
High log volume: 60 hosts, 600 GB/day indexed logs, moderate metrics and traces — typical of verbose app logging.
Hosts60
Logs600 GB/day
Metric series80,000
Spans/min8,000
Derived hosts60
Derived logs600 GB/day
Metric series80,000
Spans/min8,000
Result: Elastic Serverless from $2,683/mo to Azure Monitor at $49,743/mo — up to 95% ($47,060/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $4,000/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Logs-heavy
Result: Elastic Serverless from $1,048/mo to AWS CloudWatch at $90,515/mo — up to 99% ($89,467/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $4,000/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Traces-heavy
All estimates use publicly available list pricing with annual commitment rates where available. Enterprise negotiated pricing will vary. Sources include Datadog, Grafana Cloud, and New Relic official pricing pages. Rate updates are logged on our pricing changelog.
Self-Hosted Sizing
Infrastructure costs are calculated based on community sizing guides for Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo. Compute is mapped to real instance types with on-demand pricing.
Conservative Estimates
Real-world costs are often higher due to overages, add-on SKUs, cardinality spikes, and operational overhead. Use these numbers as a baseline.
Frequently asked questions
How much should observability cost?▾
Target 5–15% of cloud infrastructure spend for most teams. Log-heavy or full-APM environments may run higher. Use the static tables above for concrete vendor estimates at six standard profiles.
Why is Datadog so expensive?▾
Datadog meters hosts, indexed logs, APM hosts, custom metrics, and seats separately. Costs compound when everything is indexed at full fidelity. Compare Datadog rows in the tables against Grafana Cloud or self-hosted LGTM.
Is Grafana Cloud cheaper than Datadog?▾
Often at moderate volumes — see our Datadog vs Grafana comparison page. At enterprise scale with heavy APM, negotiate both vendors rather than assuming a fixed winner.
Is OpenTelemetry free?▾
OTel SDKs and the Collector are open source. You pay for backends and ops. See /opentelemetry-cost-calculator for self-hosted vs managed TCO.