Datadog
A Datadog alternative for small engineering teams
Datadog covers infrastructure monitoring, APM, logs, RUM, security, and a dozen other products, usually priced per host or per gigabyte across each one. That's real, earned breadth for a large or complex environment. It's also more platform than most small teams need just to answer "what broke, and why," which is a narrower job.
Already using Datadog? Connect it read-only
Connect a Datadog service with an application key scoped to reading logs. ForgeOps reads that service's error logs, stack traces included. You get issues, incidents, and the likely cause from the errors already going there, and nothing in Datadog changes: ForgeOps only ever reads.
Before anything is imported you see how many errors to expect against your plan. Business plan and up, and every new organization has Business for its first 14 days.
See read-only connections → · How to connect →You don't have to replace it
This isn't a migration guide, and deliberately so: ripping out Datadog is a big, risky project if you actually depend on its infrastructure or security tooling, and ForgeOps isn't trying to be a full observability replacement for that. The more realistic move for a small team is running the two side by side. Datadog keeps doing what it's already doing; ForgeOps adds a focused incident investigation workflow, error grouping, and deployment correlation on top, at a flat monthly price instead of another per-host or per-GB line item.
Datadog + ForgeOps
Datadog continues to provide your observability infrastructure. ForgeOps provides an opinionated incident investigation workflow around the signals your engineering team already cares about: which error, which deploy, which customers, resolved by whom.
Where ForgeOps fits
ForgeOps captures errors directly from your application (a small SDK, not an agent watching infrastructure), groups them, and connects each one to the deployment that likely introduced it and the customers it actually affected: see Investigation and probable cause. It's a smaller, cheaper, flat-priced piece next to Datadog's infrastructure and logs, not a competitor to either of those.
Set up takes about five minutes; the language pages have real install and config code for whatever your app runs, and it works fine alongside a Datadog agent already installed.
No credit card required.