Datadog Alternatives for Small Teams

Datadog is a great product. It's also priced for companies with dedicated platform teams and six-figure observability budgets. If you're a team of five shipping features every day, Datadog will eat your entire infrastructure budget before you've finished the onboarding wizard. The pricing page looks simple. $0.10/GB for log ingestion. But then there's indexing at $2.55 per million events, retention costs, per-host APM fees, custom metrics charges, and the silent killer: cardinality. Log a high-cardinality field like user_id or trace_id and your bill explodes because Datadog indexes every unique value. Most small teams discover this after their first real month of usage. The POC was cheap because traffic was low. Production traffic hits and suddenly the bill is $500/month for a team that's spending $200/month on actual compute. What small teams actually need Let's be honest about what a team of 5-20 engineers needs from log monitoring: Know when something breaks. Automatically. Without