Datadog is an observability platform, a hosted service that collects data about running software so that engineers can see its health, find the cause of problems and fix them. It is made up of many products that can be used alone or together, covering infrastructure, applications, logs, security and user experience.
Data arrives through the Datadog Agent (monitoring software that runs on the monitored machines) and through more than 1,000 integrations; the AWS integration, for example, collects logs, events and metrics from more than 90 AWS services. Datadog stores metrics, logs, events and traces (records of one request as it passes through several services), and shows them in dashboards. Application Performance Monitoring assesses how applications perform, and Synthetic Monitoring simulates users around the world to test a website, API or mobile app. Monitors watch chosen metrics against thresholds and send notifications by e-mail or Slack to the right people; downtimes mute alerts during planned maintenance.
Datadog is a hosted service. Most products are priced per host or per volume of data each month, after a free trial; a free tier covers up to five Basic hosts.