Used For

• +**Your mobile app crashes for 15% of iPhone users after an update** → Datadog alerts instantly, you fix the iOS bug same day instead of hemorrhaging users
• +**Servers sitting idle at 20% utilization while your cloud bill hits $5K/month** → Spot the waste, resize everything, save $2K monthly
• +**Slow database queries killing your API but you're debugging blind** → Distributed tracing shows exactly which query is the bottleneck
• +Service maps reveal hidden dependencies — discover that random microservice everyone forgot about is actually critical
• +Machine learning spots anomalies automatically — no more setting up 200 manual thresholds that cry wolf

Best For

• >Your app crashed at 3am and you found out from angry customers on Twitter
• >Managing 50+ servers across different clouds and losing track of what's actually running
• >Your CEO wants to know why the cloud bill jumped 40% last month

Not For

• -Teams under 50 people — you're paying $15+ per server monthly for features you don't need yet
• -Anyone wanting simple setup — you'll spend weeks tuning alerts or drown in 300 notifications daily
• -Budget-conscious startups — the log ingestion fees hit $0.10 per GB and add up faster than your runway burns

Pairs With

• ***AWS/GCP/Azure** (where your actual infrastructure runs and generates the metrics Datadog slurps up)
• ***Kubernetes** (because container orchestration creates the complexity that makes Datadog worth its price tag)
• ***Slack** (where alerts ping your team at 2am and where people complain about alert fatigue)
• ***PagerDuty** (for escalating the alerts that actually matter to whoever's on call)
• ***PostgreSQL/MongoDB** (the databases whose slow queries Datadog will gleefully expose in painful detail)
• ***Grafana** (what some teams use alongside Datadog for prettier dashboards because Datadog's aren't winning design awards)

The Catch

• !The sticker price doubles once you enable application tracing and log management — basic infrastructure monitoring is the gateway drug
• !You'll hit surprise overage fees when you ingest 500GB of logs unexpectedly and get a $5K bill
• !Takes 1-2 weeks to properly configure distributed tracing in microservices, not the "5 minutes" their demos show

Bottom Line

The gold standard for monitoring that costs gold standard prices — you'll know exactly what's broken and exactly how much you're paying for that privilege.