Grafana Synthetic Monitoring vs Datadog Synthetic Monitoring

Free tier available

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

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

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.

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

14-day trial.

Established

Grafana Labs · since 2021

Category standard

Datadog · since 2019

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Teams already running Grafana Cloud and k6.

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