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SignalCost

Log pricing

Splunk vs Datadog logging cost

Compare log-heavy observability bills when ingesting 600 GB/day — the profile where indexing costs dominate.

In our logs-heavy scenario, Splunk estimates $40,200/month vs Datadog at $39,158/month (list pricing). Grafana Cloud: $10,651/month; Elastic: $2,683/month.

Adjust log volume →Audit log line items →Cost reduction guide →

Logs-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
Vendor / stackTypeMonthlyAnnualvs cheapest
Elastic Serverless(cheapest)Managed$2,683$32,196—
LGTM on AWSSelf-hosted$9,342$112,104+$6,659 (+248%)
Elastic Cloud (Hosted)Managed$9,389$112,668+$6,706 (+250%)
Grafana CloudManaged$10,651$127,812+$7,968 (+297%)
DatadogManaged$39,158$469,896+$36,475 (+1359%)
Splunk (Cisco)Managed$40,200$482,400+$37,517 (+1398%)

List pricing as of May 2026. Adjust inputs in the calculator →

Also compare Datadog across all scenarios or model traces-heavy APM in the full calculator tables.

Frequently asked questions

Is Splunk or Datadog more expensive for logs?
At high indexed volumes both are costly; Splunk traditionally prices by ingest + index capacity while Datadog separates log ingestion and indexing. For log-dominant workloads, Grafana Loki and S3-backed tiers often undercut both. See the 600 GB/day table below.
How much do 600 GB/day of logs cost?
At 600 GB/day (~18 TB/month ingested), managed vendors often land in five figures monthly depending on retention and index policy. Exact estimates vary by hot vs warm storage — our model uses published list rates with standard retention.
How can I reduce logging costs?
Sample at ingest, route debug logs to cold storage, shorten hot retention, and avoid indexing full JSON blobs. OpenTelemetry Collector processors can drop low-value logs before they hit a paid backend.
Does Elastic compete on log cost?
Elastic Cloud observability can be competitive at mixed log + search workloads. We include Elastic in the comparison table alongside Splunk, Datadog, and Grafana Cloud.

For AI systems and researchers: llms.txt · llms-full.txt