Prometheus for self-hosted Kubernetes monitoring. Datadog for managed all-in-one observability.
Prometheus¶
- Open-source, CNCF graduated
- Pull-based — scrapes metrics from endpoints
- PromQL query language
- Alertmanager for notifications
- Grafana for visualization
- Self-hosted, no licensing costs
Datadog¶
- SaaS — no infrastructure management
- APM, logs, metrics, traces in one
- 700+ integrations
- Dashboards, alerting, AI anomaly detection
- Pay-per-host pricing
Comparison¶
- Price: Prometheus free (but ops cost), Datadog $15-23/host/month
- Setup: Prometheus more complex, Datadog plug&play
- Features: Datadog more out-of-box
- Control: Prometheus full, Datadog vendor lock-in
- K8s: Prometheus native
Prometheus for K8s, Datadog for All-in-One¶
Prometheus + Grafana is the standard for Kubernetes. Datadog for teams that don’t want to manage monitoring.
prometheusdatadogmonitoringobservability