Observability TCO Comparison

Compare true total cost of ownership — infrastructure and human operational costs — across observability platforms

*Not validated by Elastic Product, Marketing, or Competitive Intelligence for accuracy. Internal estimation tool only — calibrated against the Elastic Cloud pricing table and ad hoc field feedback (e.g. Serverless estimator alignment). Other vendor rates and conversion assumptions are approximate. Confirm all figures with official pricing, contracts, and customer usage before customer-facing quotes.

⚠️

Estimation purposes only. Elastic Serverless uses Observability Complete ingest + retention tiers from the Elastic Cloud pricing table where enabled. Datadog and other vendors use approximate list pricing. Add-ons (synthetics, LLM, Agent Builder, support ECUs) are not included.

Elastic Cloud pricing table (Observability)

Configuration

100/sec
1/sec1.00M/sec
10

Each tag multiplies your metric volume by this number

Elastic ingest + retention

Elastic bills ingest and retention separately. Applies to Serverless and ECH variable pricing in this calculator. Adjust retention to match your Streams policy or competitor comparison window.

1 mo13 mo15 mo

Default: Observability Complete tier table from cloud.elastic.co — ingest ($0.50/GB for 0–1,500 GB through $0.0925/GB at 150,000+ GB) and retention ($0.04/GB-month for 0–10,000 GB through $0.0188/GB-month).

Datadog host licensing

Infrastructure Pro ($15/host/mo) on Metrics and APM Pro ($31/host/mo) on Tracing. Host count comes from infrastructure inventory or log GB/day (10 GB/day ≈ 250 hosts) — not from metrics/sec volume.

Estimated 250 hosts (linux/windows/k8s-node inventory, or log GB/day ÷ 0.04 GB/host/day)

Human / Operational Costs

Self-hosted platforms require engineering time to operate. Enable to see true TCO.

$60/hr$120/hr$250/hr

Default $120/hr ≈ $250k/yr fully-loaded (salary + benefits + overhead)

Network Egress Costs

Egress costs excluded from calculations. Enable to see full TCO including data transfer costs.

Metric Volume Impact

Metric Source
Mixed
320 bytes/datapoint
Metrics per Second
100/sec
Monthly Metrics
259.20M

TCO Comparison*

*Not validated by Elastic Product, Marketing, or Competitive Intelligence for accuracy. Internal estimation tool only — calibrated against the Elastic Cloud pricing table and ad hoc field feedback (e.g. Serverless estimator alignment). Other vendor rates and conversion assumptions are approximate. Confirm all figures with official pricing, contracts, and customer usage before customer-facing quotes.

Compare platforms — Elastic & Datadog shown by default
Elastic Serverless
$1,002$12,021/yr
Elastic Cloud Hosted (ECH)
$2,127$25,523/yr
Datadog
$4,710$56,520/yr

Costs include estimated operational overhead ($120/hr fully-loaded engineer rate). Toggle in Configuration panel.

Pricing is based on publicly available list rates as of March 2026. Elastic Serverless reflects the November 2025 pricing. All figures are estimates — actual costs vary with negotiated discounts, committed use, and deployment configuration. Use the Full Stack TCO tab for a complete cross-signal comparison. Contact your SE for a custom TCO analysis.