Datadog → SigNoz
What it saves, what actually moves, what you rebuild — and the thing that catches people.
What it costs, and what it saves
SigNoz self-hosted is free and stores in ClickHouse, which compresses observability data 10–20× better than Elasticsearch. Teams report 80% storage cost reductions against SaaS. Against a $600/month Datadog bill, expect $40–80 in infrastructure.
Moves cleanly
Your instrumentation, if it is OpenTelemetry. That is the whole reason to pick SigNoz over Grafana: same OTel collectors, different backend.
You rebuild
Dashboards and alerts. But because SigNoz is metrics, traces and logs in one product, you rebuild once rather than wiring three tools together.
What Datadog costs you today
Per-host and per-feature billing that scales quickly: infrastructure monitoring starts around $15–23 per host/month, APM and log management are billed on top (logs per-GB ingested and per-million events retained), and custom metrics add further cost — large fleets routinely see five- and six-figure annual bills.
What actually holds you in
Proprietary agents, proprietary query languages, and per-host/per-feature pricing mean both your cost and your data gravity grow with your fleet — the more you instrument, the harder and more expensive it is to leave.
What you are moving to
SigNoz brings metrics, traces, and logs into one open-source application built natively on OpenTelemetry, so you get APM-style visibility without per-host SaaS pricing.
Free / self-host; optional managed cloud
SigNoz strengths
- One app for traces, metrics, and logs
- OpenTelemetry-native
- Purpose-built as a Datadog replacement
What you give up
- Younger ecosystem than Grafana
- Self-hosting needs a datastore to operate
The migration, step by step
- 1Deploy SigNoz with docker compose or the Helm chart — it brings its own ClickHouse
- 2Repoint your OpenTelemetry collector exporter at SigNoz; if you are on the Datadog agent, swap it for the OTel collector first
- 3Verify traces and metrics arrive before touching anything else
- 4Rebuild alerts in SigNoz, run parallel for a cycle
- 5Size the ClickHouse volume properly — this is the step people skip
The gotcha
ClickHouse is the whole product underneath and it is not a database you neglect. Disk fills faster than expected during incident spikes, and a full ClickHouse volume stops ingestion silently. Set a disk alert on the observability box itself, which feels absurd and is necessary.
When to stay on Datadog
You need Datadog's breadth of turnkey integrations — 800-plus against SigNoz's much smaller set — or your team has no appetite to run ClickHouse.
Other ways off Datadog
More Layer 3 migrations
Figures verified 2026-07-12 against vendor pricing pages. Prices change and migrations differ by estate — treat the cost delta as a starting model, not a quote. Rankings and recommendations here are merit-only; affiliate income never changes a verdict. See our methodology.