Why engineering teams choose Last9 vs Datadog
Both have an AI assistant and an MCP server. Last9 runs its AI on telemetry you shape before it is stored, with no per-investigation charge, inside your own cloud if you need it. Datadog has the wider catalogue, and bills its AI in credits.
1-click import for your Datadog dashboards and monitors.
Named a Gartner® Cool Vendor in AI for SRE and Observability, cited for its unified telemetry platform.
One assistant in the app, in Slack, and in your IDE, with no per-investigation charge.
Drop, aggregate, and route telemetry before you pay to store it.
At a glance
Last9 vs Datadog at a glance
The questions engineering teams ask when they compare the two.
What does the AI cost?
No per-query or per-investigation charge
Bits AI is billed in AI Credits
Can my team and my coding agents investigate from Slack and the IDE?
Yes: an assistant in the app and Slack, and an MCP server for any MCP client
Yes: Bits Chat in the app and Slack, and an MCP server for any MCP client
Can I see what my own AI agents cost?
Agents Monitoring and a Coding Agents view, part of the platform
Agent Observability, billed as a separate product
How is it billed?
One licence. The infrastructure runs on your own AWS bill, at your negotiated rates
Separate meters for hosts, ingested GB, indexed events, custom metrics, and AI credits
What happens to my high-cardinality labels?
Kept, with no sampling. 20M series per metric per day by default, and no charge per label or metric name
Each tag combination is billed above 100 per host, or each metric name on a plan added in June 2026
Can I cut telemetry cost before I pay to store it?
Yes. The Control Plane drops, aggregates, and routes at ingest
Only with Observability Pipelines, a separately priced product
Does it support PromQL and LogQL?
Yes, natively, so queries stay portable
No. A proprietary query syntax and DDSQL
Can production telemetry stay in our cloud, in our country?
Yes. Glassbox runs in your own AWS account, in any region, including India and Singapore
SaaS sites only, none in India or Singapore. BYOC covers logs only
What about everything else we already monitor?
100+ integrations, plus anything with OpenTelemetry or Prometheus
1,000+ integrations
| Capability | Last9 | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| What does the AI cost? | No per-query or per-investigation charge | Bits AI is billed in AI Credits |
| Can my team and my coding agents investigate from Slack and the IDE? | Yes: an assistant in the app and Slack, and an MCP server for any MCP client | Yes: Bits Chat in the app and Slack, and an MCP server for any MCP client |
| Can I see what my own AI agents cost? | Agents Monitoring and a Coding Agents view, part of the platform | Agent Observability, billed as a separate product |
| How is it billed? | One licence. The infrastructure runs on your own AWS bill, at your negotiated rates | Separate meters for hosts, ingested GB, indexed events, custom metrics, and AI credits |
| What happens to my high-cardinality labels? | Kept, with no sampling. 20M series per metric per day by default, and no charge per label or metric name | Each tag combination is billed above 100 per host, or each metric name on a plan added in June 2026 |
| Can I cut telemetry cost before I pay to store it? | Yes. The Control Plane drops, aggregates, and routes at ingest | Only with Observability Pipelines, a separately priced product |
| Does it support PromQL and LogQL? | Yes, natively, so queries stay portable | No. A proprietary query syntax and DDSQL |
| Can production telemetry stay in our cloud, in our country? | Yes. Glassbox runs in your own AWS account, in any region, including India and Singapore | SaaS sites only, none in India or Singapore. BYOC covers logs only |
| What about everything else we already monitor? | 100+ integrations, plus anything with OpenTelemetry or Prometheus | 1,000+ integrations |
Differences
Where Last9 and Datadog differ
Three places the two platforms take a different approach, with the tradeoffs stated.
AI on telemetry you control
-
One assistant in the app, in Slack, and in your IDE through MCP. It investigates, builds a diagnosis dashboard, and hands you the link.
-
The production agent responds to pages with context from Slack, Linear, and PagerDuty. Use Last9's models or bring your own. Customer data is never used for training.
-
An agent can do more than read. Through MCP it can add a drop rule and stop ingesting the noisy source it found.
Datadog
Bits AI covers investigation, chat, and code fixes, and is generally available. Every Bits agent draws on AI Credits.
Keep every label
-
Labels like customer_id or tenant stay on the metric. You pay for volume, not for metric names or label values.
-
A noisy label is rolled up at ingest, before it is stored.
Datadog
Each tag combination is a custom metric, billed above 100 per host, so every new label value adds to the bill. Since June 2026, a newer plan bills per metric name and data point instead.
Shape telemetry before you store it
-
Drop, remap, redact, forward, and aggregate metrics, logs, and traces at ingest, from the UI.
Datadog
Log pipelines and exclusion filters run after ingestion, so excluded data is still billed. Filtering earlier needs Observability Pipelines, priced separately.
Tradeoff
A rule that drops too much cannot be undone later, so every rule is previewed against live data before you save it.
Open standards, and your own cloud
-
OpenTelemetry-native. Send OTLP from any SDK or Collector, and your instrumentation stays portable.
-
PromQL and LogQL natively, with a builder and plain-English Ask Mode for anyone who does not write queries.
-
Glassbox runs single-tenant in your own AWS account, in any region, managed by Last9.
Datadog
Accepts OTLP, but recommends its own Agent and SDK for the full feature set. A proprietary query syntax, and SaaS sites in the US, EU, UK, Japan, Australia, and FedRAMP.
Matters most for
Regulated teams with in-country data rules, such as SEBI-regulated firms in India, and teams in regions no Datadog site serves.
Which fits you
Which one fits your team?
Choose Last9 if
- You want AI in the app, Slack, and your IDE without a credit meter on every investigation
- You want to cut telemetry at ingest rather than pay to store it first
- Your metrics are high-cardinality, and custom-metric overages are the complaint
- Production data must stay in your own AWS account, in your own country
Choose Datadog if
- You want one console that also covers security, CI, and 1,000+ integrations
- Your telemetry volume is steady, so per-host pricing is easy to forecast
- You depend on prebuilt Datadog dashboards and partner integrations
- AI credits fit your budget, and you want Bits AI in the same console
Migration
Moving off Datadog
What the switch involves, and what Last9 does for you.
1-click dashboard and monitor import
Bring your Datadog dashboards and monitors across in one click.
Keep your instrumentation
Last9 ingests OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and dual-shipped Datadog Agent data. Nothing is re-instrumented to start.
See the integrationsForward deployed engineers
On Enterprise plans, a Last9 engineer runs the move with your team.
Talk to an engineerRun both in parallel
Dual-ship to both platforms and compare them on your own incidents before you cut over.
Objections
The objections we hear most
Each one is a fair reason to hesitate.
Datadog already has Bits AI and an MCP server. Why switch for AI?
AI alone is not the difference. What differs is the cost and the data under it: Last9's AI has no per-investigation charge, works on telemetry you shaped at ingest, and can run inside your own AWS account.
Datadog has 1,000+ integrations. Do we lose coverage?
On the catalogue count, yes. Most of the gap closes because anything with an OpenTelemetry receiver or a Prometheus endpoint works with Last9. Send us your list, and we will tell you what is missing.
Is Last9 proven at our scale?
Last9 regularly handles 500M+ events a minute and 60M+ concurrent users, and has monitored 12 of the world's 20 largest streaming events. Teams across fintech, healthcare, gaming, media, and commerce run it in production, including Replit, Pine Labs, Tata 1mg, and Housing.com.
We have years of dashboards, monitors, and saved views.
Dashboards and monitors import in one click. Saved views, notebooks, and Datadog-specific queries need rework, and a Last9 engineer scopes that with you before you sign.
67%
Average reduction in observability costs
2.5x
More telemetry retained without sampling
1-click
Datadog import, migrations within 2 weeks
24x7
Support from forward deployed engineers
Customers
What do Last9 customers say?
With Last9, we just eliminated the toil. No more worrying about failing dashboards or alerts — we can finally use our metrics. It just works.
Last9 allowed us to offload the operational overhead of scaling so we could focus on business alerting rather than infrastructure management.
Frequently asked questions
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