Datadog

Datadog pricing is per-host and per-feature. Infrastructure monitoring starts at $15/host/month. APM adds $31/host/month. Log management starts at $0.10/GB indexed. For a startup with 3–5 hosts using infrastructure + APM, expect $150–$300/month. The $2,000 startup credit covers 6–13 months at this usage level.

Datadog is easier to set up and provides a more unified experience (all features in one platform). Grafana Cloud has a more generous free tier and is cheaper at scale. For startups that want the fastest path to observability, Datadog wins. For cost-conscious startups willing to invest more setup time, Grafana Cloud is the better value.

The essential monitoring setup: infrastructure metrics (CPU, memory, disk for every host), application performance (request latency, error rate, throughput via APM), database performance (query timing, connection pool usage), and logs (centralized search across all services). This covers 90% of production debugging needs.

Yes. Datadog has deep integrations with AWS (50+ services including EC2, ECS, Lambda, RDS, S3) and Kubernetes (pod metrics, node health, container resource usage, deployment tracking). The Datadog Agent runs as a DaemonSet in Kubernetes or installs on EC2 instances via package manager.

Basic infrastructure monitoring: 30 minutes (install Agent, configure cloud integration). Adding APM tracing: 1–2 hours (add tracing library to application, verify traces appear). Full setup with dashboards, alerts, and log management: half a day. Datadog is the fastest observability platform to go from zero to production monitoring.

Yes. Datadog's startup credit program accepts bootstrapped and self-funded startups. The requirement is a production or near-production application that needs monitoring — not a funding round.