Observability pricing by category

Pick an observability category to see every vendor's rate for that signal side by side. We compare 16 vendors across 6 categories: APM (per host, per vCPU, per user or usage), log management (almost always per GB ingested), infrastructure & metrics (per host or per active series), RUM (per 1,000 sessions), distributed tracing (bundled in APM or per span/event) and error tracking (per error event). Each category page ranks vendors by their listed rate.

Data as of June 2026.

APM

Tracing & application monitoring · 12 vendors

APM (application performance monitoring) traces requests through your services to find slow endpoints, errors and dependencies. Pricing is split between per-host vendors (Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk), per-vCPU (AppDynamics), per-user (New Relic) and usage-based (Sentry, Honeycomb). Log management

Logging · 14 vendors

Log management ingests, indexes and searches application and infrastructure logs. Almost everyone prices logs per GB ingested (and sometimes per GB-month retained), so log volume is usually the biggest and most volatile line on an observability bill. Infrastructure & metrics

Metrics · 14 vendors

Infrastructure and metrics monitoring tracks hosts, containers and time-series metrics. Vendors split between per-host (Datadog, Splunk), per active series (Grafana), per data-point (Sumo Logic) and per-GB or per-event ingest (New Relic, Elastic, Coralogix). RUM

Frontend / digital experience · 10 vendors

RUM (real user monitoring) measures real browser and mobile experience -- page loads, web vitals, errors and session replay. It is usually priced per 1,000 sessions or per pageview, separate from backend host or ingest costs. Distributed tracing

Tracing · 15 vendors

Distributed tracing follows a request across services as spans. It is usually bundled into APM (Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk) or billed by span/event volume (Sentry, Honeycomb, Coralogix, Logz.io) and by GB on per-GB platforms. Error tracking

Error tracking · 4 vendors

Error tracking captures and groups application exceptions with stack traces and release context. Sentry is the category leader, priced by error-event volume; Datadog, New Relic and Better Stack include error tracking within their broader platforms.

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Last updated: 2026-06-21