Hey folks! I'm in the middle of a big observability platform evaluation for my team, and the classic showdown is on the table: **Datadog vs New Relic**. Both are incredibly powerful, but the pricing models can be a real maze to navigate when you're trying to forecast costs.
I've gotten some initial quotes, and I'd love to calibrate with the community. From my research, the value seems to swing heavily based on your specific data volume and which pillars you use most.
Here's a rough breakdown of what I'm seeing so far:
* **Datadog's "All-in" pricing** can feel steep at first, but having logs, traces, and metrics in one place with their tight correlation is a huge efficiency win for on-call. Their custom metrics pricing is a major cost factor to watch.
* **New Relic's "Data Plus" model** seems more flexible if your usage is bursty. I like that telemetry data is just data, but predicting costs when everything (logs, spans, metrics) consumes from the same pool is a new kind of challenge.
Has anyone done a recent deep dive or renewal? I'm particularly curious about:
* Real-world cost per application/host at moderate scale (say, ~50 services, ~200 hosts).
* How the inclusion of APM, infrastructure, and log management changes the equation.
* Any gotchas with long-term data retention or egress fees.
Sharing anonymized quotes or percentage discounts you've achieved would be incredibly helpful! Let's help each other build better, more cost-effective observability stacks. 🦉