Happy Valley

Datadog vs Tessary

Datadog and Tessary are both uptime & monitoring tools. Datadog is aimed at enterprise and developers, while Tessary is aimed at developers and small businesses. Both have a free plan.

Datadog

Cloud monitoring and security platform

Tessary

Open-source monitoring that finds why production AI agents fail

PricingFreemium · $18Open source
Starting price$18/moNot published
Free planYesYes
Free trial14 days—
Built forEnterprise, DevelopersDevelopers, Small businesses, Enterprise
Platformswebweb, linux
CountryUS · 2010—
Rating——

Choose Datadog if

Scale-ups and enterprises running complex cloud infrastructure with budget for observability.

  • Broadest observability coverage in one tool
  • Excellent dashboards and correlation
  • 900+ integrations

Look elsewhere if: Startups and small teams (Grafana Cloud free, Better Stack, Sentry).

Choose Tessary if

Engineering teams running AI agents in production with OpenTelemetry traces who want every trace checked and failures explained.

  • Apache 2.0 open source with free self-hosting
  • Checks every trace instead of a sampled subset
  • RCA links failures to specific commits when a repo is connected

Look elsewhere if: Teams that want a mature, fully supported observability suite or an eval-first workflow (Datadog, Braintrust).

Datadog vs Tessary pricing

Datadog

  • Free$0Up to 5 hosts, 1-day metric retention
  • Infrastructure Pro$18/host/moOn-demand; $15 billed annually
  • Infrastructure Enterprise$27/host/moOn-demand; $23 billed annually
  • APM$36/host/moOn-demand; $31 billed annually with Infrastructure
  • Log Management$0.10/GB ingestedIngest only; indexing billed separately

Tessary

  • Open Source$0Self-host with Docker Compose; all core features
  • Cloud Free$010k traces/mo, 1 GB, 30-day retention, $10 one-time RCA credit
  • PaidCustomCustom classifiers, managed dedicated instance, Slack support

Datadog · Key features

  • Infrastructure metrics and host maps
  • APM, distributed tracing and continuous profiler
  • Log management with pipelines and archives
  • RUM, session replay and synthetic monitoring
  • Security monitoring and cloud SIEM
  • Incident management and Bits AI

Cons

  • Expensive and complex pricing
  • Costs grow with hosts and log volume
  • Easy to overspend on custom metrics

Tessary · Key features

  • Classifiers run on every production trace with no sampling
  • Built-in checks for drift, tool errors, secret leaks and malformed output
  • LLM triage groups real deviations into trackable cases
  • Root-cause analysis over failing traces and your GitHub repository
  • OTLP ingestion over HTTP and gRPC with OpenTelemetry gen_ai conventions
  • PII redaction before traces are stored

Cons

  • Very new project with a short track record
  • Paid plan prices are not published
  • Frustration classifier requires your own OpenRouter or TypeSafe key

Datadog vs Tessary: FAQ

Do Datadog and Tessary have a free plan?

Yes, both Datadog and Tessary have a free plan; paid plans add more usage and features.

Which is better for small businesses, Datadog or Tessary?

Tessary lists small businesses as a core audience, while Datadog is aimed more at enterprise and developers.

Not sure yet?