Dynatrace vs Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

From $58 per month per 8 GiB host (full-stack), or $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour

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

Consumption-based pricing across hosts, synthetic requests, RUM sessions and log volume, billed on memory rather than CPU — a large host costs proportionally more. Enterprise contracts are large.

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.

15-day trial.

14-day trial.

Widely used

Dynatrace · since 2005

Category standard

Datadog · since 2019

• Automatic discovery and dependency mapping removes most manual instrumentation work.
• Davis root-cause analysis genuinely reduces alert noise in complex estates.
• Covers mainframe and SAP alongside cloud-native workloads.

• 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.

• Expensive, with consumption pricing that is hard to forecast.
• Heavy platform aimed at organisations with a dedicated operations function.
• Overkill for a straightforward web application.

• 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.

Large enterprises with complex hybrid estates and a dedicated SRE or operations team.

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