This is the only independent, vendor-neutral monitoring cost calculator on the web. Every other calculator you will find online is built by a vendor to steer you toward their product. Ours compares six major platforms simultaneously using the same infrastructure inputs, so you get an honest apples-to-apples cost comparison in seconds.
Adjust the sliders below to match your infrastructure. The results table updates in real time, showing a detailed cost breakdown by component (infrastructure, APM, logs, custom metrics) for each vendor. All calculations use current published list pricing as of April 2026. Annual billing discounts of 15-25% are available from most vendors but are not applied here to ensure transparent comparison of base rates.
For New Relic, the calculation assumes 5 full-platform users at standard tier and includes the 100GB/month free data ingest allowance. For Datadog, log costs include both ingestion and indexing charges. For Dynatrace, infrastructure pricing reflects estimated DPS unit consumption for the specified host count. All estimates represent starting points for budgeting and may vary based on specific usage patterns, negotiated enterprise rates, and add-on features.
By choosing New Relic over Datadog, you could save $8,905/month ($106,860/year).
This calculator uses published list pricing from each vendor as of April 2026. All prices are monthly rates without annual billing discounts. Real-world costs may be lower with annual commitments (typically 15-25% discount) or higher due to hidden costs like custom metrics overages, log indexing surcharges, and retention extensions that are not captured in this simplified model.
For Datadog, log costs include both ingestion ($0.10/GB) and indexing ($1.70/M events), assuming approximately 3 million events per GB of log data. Custom metrics overages are calculated based on Datadog's included allowance of 100 custom metrics per host. For New Relic, we assume 5 full-platform users at the Standard tier ($49/user/month = $245 base) plus per-GB data ingest at $0.30/GB beyond the 100GB free monthly allowance.
Grafana Cloud pricing is based on their published per-host rate for infrastructure metrics plus per-GB log ingest. Dynatrace pricing is estimated based on typical DPS unit consumption for the specified host count. Elastic pricing uses their published per-GB ingest rate for Elastic Cloud. Splunk pricing reflects Splunk Observability Cloud per-host and workload-based log pricing.
This calculator does not include costs for synthetic monitoring, real user monitoring (RUM), database monitoring, security monitoring, or other add-on products. For a complete cost estimate including all products, contact each vendor directly or see our detailed Datadog pricing breakdown which covers all 12 products.
| Vendor | Pricing Source | Last Verified |
|---|---|---|
| Datadog | Official pricing page | April 2026 |
| New Relic | Official pricing page | April 2026 |
| Grafana Cloud | Official pricing page | April 2026 |
| Dynatrace | Official pricing page | April 2026 |
| Elastic Observability | Official pricing page | April 2026 |
| Splunk Observability | Official pricing page | April 2026 |
This calculator uses published list pricing from each vendor's official pricing page as of April 2026. It provides a reliable estimate for budgeting purposes but may not reflect your exact costs for several reasons: enterprise contracts typically include 15-40% discounts off list price, hidden costs like custom metrics overages and log indexing surcharges can add 37-97% above base estimates, and consumption-based models like Dynatrace DPS depend on actual workload patterns. We recommend using these estimates as a starting point and requesting formal quotes from your top 2-3 vendor choices for precise pricing.
Monitoring vendors use fundamentally different pricing models that create massive cost differences for the same infrastructure. Per-host pricing (Datadog at $15/host) is expensive for large auto-scaling deployments. Per-user plus data ingest pricing (New Relic) favours small teams with large infrastructure. Per-active-series pricing (Grafana Cloud) is cheaper for controlled environments but expensive for high-cardinality Kubernetes deployments. The same 100-host infrastructure can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $15,000 per month depending on vendor choice, pricing model, and which telemetry types (logs, traces, metrics) you enable.
The cheapest vendor is not always the best choice. Monitoring platforms differ significantly in ease of setup, breadth of integrations, alerting capabilities, dashboard quality, support responsiveness, and AI-powered analysis features. Datadog is typically the most expensive option but offers the fastest time-to-value and the broadest integration library (750+). Self-hosted Prometheus is the cheapest in software costs but requires significant engineering investment. The right choice depends on your team's technical capacity, how much engineering time you can dedicate to monitoring infrastructure, and whether the cost savings from a cheaper vendor justify the trade-offs in developer productivity and operational overhead.
This calculator covers the four largest cost components: infrastructure monitoring, APM, log management, and custom metrics. It does not include synthetic monitoring (typically $5-12/10K runs), real user monitoring ($1.50-1.80/1K sessions on Datadog), database monitoring ($7-23/host), network monitoring ($5-7/host), security monitoring ($0.20/GB), or CI visibility ($8/committer). For most teams, the four components in this calculator represent 70-85% of total monitoring spend. Hidden costs like custom metrics overages from Kubernetes, log indexing surcharges, and retention extensions can add 30-100% to these base estimates. See our hidden costs guide for a complete breakdown.