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Pricing and comparisons

Datadog vs Azure Monitor - Dividing Roles with the Built-in Monitoring

If you use Azure, Azure Monitor is already in your hands. So where is the reason to add Datadog? This article organizes the conditions for dividing roles using only primary official sources from both sides: Azure Monitor's coverage and billing structure, how Datadog sees Azure, and a configuration that avoids paying both.

About 11 min read

Three Conditions That Decide the Division of Roles

Starting with the conclusion: which of Azure Monitor and Datadog to make primary is decided by the breadth of your monitoring targets and the depth of the layers you want to see. If you use only Azure and what you want to see is the state of Azure resources and alerts, starting with Azure Monitor is natural. If your monitoring targets extend to AWS or on-premises, or you want to follow application slowness through traces, logs, and real user experience connected on a single screen, adding Datadog becomes worthwhile.

  • Condition 1: Are your monitoring targets Azure only? If non-Azure (AWS / on-premises / SaaS) is mixed in, the side that can span them becomes primary
  • Condition 2: How deep are the layers you want to see? Up to resource state and alerts, Azure Monitor; down to application internals (traces / real users), Datadog
  • Condition 3: Where do you want to consolidate billing? Azure Monitor if you want a single Azure invoice, Datadog if you manage monitoring costs independently
Decision conditions for dividing roles (the author's assessment based on primary official sources from both sides)

These three conditions correspond to the subsequent sections of this article: Azure Monitor's coverage, how Datadog sees Azure, and the difference in billing structure. The decision pattern is the same as in Datadog vs CloudWatch, but Azure Monitor has the explicitly stated characteristic that "features enabled by default are free", so read on with that point as the axis.

Azure Monitor's Coverage - Metrics, Log Analytics, and Application Insights

By the official definition, Azure Monitor is Microsoft's unified observability service that collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry from cloud and hybrid environments, bringing together metrics, logs, traces, and events (as of September 2026, Source: Azure Monitor overview). This article views it in three parts. The first is resource monitoring, which collects logs and metrics from all resources of the Azure services you use. The second is the data platform, consisting of Log Analytics workspaces analyzed with KQL and Azure Monitor workspaces where Prometheus / OpenTelemetry metrics are analyzed with PromQL. The third is Application Insights, which the official documentation positions as an OpenTelemetry-based APM feature. Datadog's comparison counterpart is this whole set, including not only resource monitoring but also APM and log analysis.

From Where Does Datadog See Azure?

The entry point on the Datadog side is the Azure integration. When you configure in Datadog the credentials of an App Registration with permissions on the target subscriptions, Datadog collects metrics and logs via the API. Log forwarding is either automatic setup via an ARM template or manual configuration of Event Hub (as of September 2026, Source: Azure). For the procedure, see Integrations. Azure virtual machines are billed as hosts one by one regardless of whether the Agent is present, and a VM with the Agent that the integration also picks up is not double-counted. App Service plan nodes are also counted as hosts. Metric collection for other resources such as Azure SQL Database does not affect the monthly charge (as of September 2026, Source: Azure Integration Billing). VMs can be excluded from billing by tag, but this applies only to VMs without the Agent.

How the Billing Structures Differ - Ingested GB and Retention vs Hosts and SKUs

Azure Monitor is pay-as-you-go, and the official documentation states explicitly that "there is no charge for features that are enabled by default", citing activity log collection and alerts, and platform metric collection and analysis, as examples. The largest cost item is log ingestion into Log Analytics (as of September 2026, Source: Azure Monitor cost and usage). Datadog has a structure that stacks SKUs on a host unit price, and placing them side by side gives the following table.

Comparison of billing structures (Azure = official documentation as of September 2026 / Datadog = billing units on the official pricing page)
AspectAzure MonitorDatadog
Basic modelPay-as-you-go. Features enabled by default (platform metrics, activity logs) are freePer-product SKUs stacked on a host unit price (Infrastructure Monitoring differs in unit price between Pro and Enterprise)
LogsBilled by ingested GB (10^9 bytes) and retention. Analytics logs include 31 days of retention at no extra charge. Commitment tiers (from 100 GB / day) carry a lower unit price than pay-as-you-goIngestion per GB + indexing per million events (the unit price varies with retention days)
MetricsPlatform metrics are free. The managed service for Prometheus is billed by ingested samples and queries, with 18 months of retention at no extra chargeStandard metrics are included in the host unit price. Custom metrics are billed beyond the per-host allotment
AlertsBilled by alert rule signal type and count, frequency, and notificationsNo standalone SKU for monitors on the pricing page
Publication of unit pricesUnit prices on the pricing page are displayed dynamically by region and currency (no figures shown in this article)Three USD columns (annual contract / monthly contract / on-demand) listed statically on the pricing page
Source: Azure Monitor Logs cost calculations and options / Azure Monitor cost and usage / Datadog Pricing

Azure calculates the billable size from the string representation of columns and excludes standard columns, so the official documentation explains that the billable size is on average about 25% smaller than the received data. Because Datadog's indexing counts events, estimating the same logs on both sides uses two different yardsticks: GB and event count. For how SKUs are stacked, see How to Decode the Pricing Structure. This article explains how billing works. For current unit prices and plans, refer to each vendor's official pricing page.

Where Azure Monitor Is Superior

The single fact that it appears on the same Azure invoice is by itself a reason to choose Azure Monitor. First, it starts without additional installation. Platform metric and activity log collection is enabled by default and free, so basic monitoring is running from the moment you sign up (as of September 2026, Source: Azure Monitor cost and usage). Next is comprehensiveness. It collects logs and metrics from all Azure resources, is integrated into each service's portal screens, and comes with dedicated insights (Source: Azure Monitor overview). Cost management is also handled on the same Microsoft Cost Management + Billing screen. For logs too, discounts relative to pay-as-you-go through commitment tiers, free queries on analytics logs, and 31 days of retention included are stated explicitly (Source: Azure Monitor Logs cost). If you are on Azure alone and resource monitoring and alerts are the main purpose, there are not many areas where Datadog can win as an add-on.

Conditions Under Which Datadog Pays Off

Datadog pays off when you have monitoring targets outside Azure or want to see through to the application layer as a whole. The first is cross-cutting reach. Azure data lines up under the same Tag scheme as data from Agents on AWS or on-premises, and a single question, "all hosts with env:prod", pulls from multiple clouds. The second is unification of layers. APM, Log Management, and RUM are on the same screen, and you can descend along a single path from a real user's slow screen to traces, logs, and hosts. The third is the simplicity of counting: an Azure VM is one host regardless of whether the Agent is present, so installing the Agent does not change the per-host billing (as of September 2026, Source: Azure Integration Billing). The frank assessment is that in a configuration where none of these conditions applies, the cost-effectiveness of adding Datadog is thin.

A Configuration That Does Not Pay Twice, and the Difference from the CloudWatch Comparison

If you use both, first draw the line so that you do not pay both sides for the same data.

  • 1. Platform metrics and activity logs are free on the Azure side, so there is no need to stop them on Azure even if you send them to Datadog
  • 2. Decide on one place for application logs, either Log Analytics or Datadog. Ingesting into both means paying twice for the GB
  • 3. APM is either Application Insights or Datadog APM. Do not put both instrumentations into the same application
  • 4. Install the Agent on Azure VMs. The host count on the Datadog side does not change; only the information you can obtain increases
  • 5. For alerts, decide which side fires the primary alert and remove duplicates so that notification destinations do not multiply
Drawing the line for combined use without paying twice (the author's assessment based on primary official sources from both sides)

The structure of this article resembles Datadog vs CloudWatch, but there are also two differences. One is that because Azure Monitor explicitly states "default features are free", the decision to leave the foundation of resource monitoring on the Azure side is less of a dilemma in terms of cost. The other is that because Datadog's Azure VM billing does not change with the presence of the Agent, the decision to install the Agent can be separated from billing and made purely on "whether you want to see the internals". Guidelines by scale on whether to adopt are left to the Adoption Checklist.

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IntegrationsIntegrations are the bundle of entry points that pour data from external systems such as AWS and MySQL into Datadog. Where you configure them splits into two families, the Agent side and the cloud account side, and which one you choose changes both what you can see and how billing is counted.Infrastructure MonitoringInfrastructure Monitoring is the product that visualizes the state of servers, containers, and cloud resources at the host level. The host map and process list let you grasp at a glance which host is struggling right now.Log ManagementLog Management is the product that gathers logs from servers, containers, and cloud services in one place and connects them to search, retention, and notification. It has a distinctive structure in which ingestion and indexing are billed separately.

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