Datadog Synthetic Monitoring vs Grafana Synthetic Monitoring

From $5 per 10k API test runs (browser tests are $12 per 1k)

Free tier available

Note the different units: Datadog bills API tests per ten thousand runs and browser tests per thousand, so browser tests are roughly 24x the unit cost. A test run is one execution from one location, so multi-location checks multiply. Costs land inside a wider Datadog contract that is rarely small.

Cheap if you already run Grafana Cloud; results are plain Prometheus metrics you already know how to use.

14-day trial.

Included in the Grafana Cloud free tier with a monthly check allowance.

Category standard

Datadog · since 2019

Established

Grafana Labs · since 2021

• Correlation with APM traces and logs makes root-cause analysis dramatically faster.
• Private locations let you monitor internal services behind the firewall.
• Recorded browser tests are authorable by people who do not write code.

• Results are Prometheus metrics, so alerting and dashboards use tools you already have.
• Same k6 scripts serve load testing and synthetic monitoring.
• Good free tier within Grafana Cloud.

• Only worth it if you are already a Datadog customer; standalone it is expensive.
• Datadog billing complexity is a well-known source of budget surprises.
• The recorder produces tests that are harder to version and review than code.

• Assumes you are in the Grafana ecosystem; standalone it makes little sense.
• Browser checks are less mature than Datadog's or Checkly's.
• Fewer probe locations than the dedicated vendors.

Existing Datadog customers who want monitoring in the same pane as their observability data.

Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.