Datadog Has a Free Infrastructure Monitoring Plan — Watch Your Servers Without Enterprise Pricing

Datadog is the monitoring platform that enterprise teams love. What most people don't know: it has a free tier that covers basic infrastructure monitoring for up to 5 hosts.

Free Tier

• Up to 5 hosts
• Infrastructure monitoring
• Core integrations (500+)
• 1-day metric retention
• Dashboards and alerting
• Community support

Agent Installation

# Install on Linux
DD_AGENT_MAJOR_VERSION=7 DD_API_KEY=your-api-key   bash -c "$(curl -L https://install.datadoghq.com/scripts/install_script_agent7.sh)"

# Docker
docker run -d --name datadog-agent   -e DD_API_KEY=your-api-key   -e DD_SITE="datadoghq.com"   -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro   -v /proc/:/host/proc/:ro   -v /sys/fs/cgroup/:/host/sys/fs/cgroup:ro   gcr.io/datadoghq/agent:7

Custom Metrics via API

// Send custom metrics
await fetch('https://api.datadoghq.com/api/v2/series', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'DD-API-KEY': 'your-api-key',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    series: [{
      metric: 'app.requests.count',
      type: 0, // count
      points: [{ timestamp: Math.floor(Date.now()/1000), value: 42 }],
      tags: ['env:production', 'service:api', 'endpoint:/users']
    }]
  })
});

// Send events
await fetch('https://api.datadoghq.com/api/v1/events', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'DD-API-KEY': 'your-api-key',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    title: 'Deploy completed',
    text: 'Version 2.4.1 deployed to production',
    alert_type: 'success',
    tags: ['deploy', 'production']
  })
});

500+ Integrations

Out of the box, Datadog monitors:

• Cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure (auto-discovery)
• Containers: Docker, Kubernetes, ECS
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis
• Web servers: Nginx, Apache, HAProxy
• Languages: Node.js, Python, Java, Go, Ruby

The Bottom Line

Datadog's free tier with 5 hosts and 500+ integrations is enough to monitor a small infrastructure setup. Great for startups and side projects before committing to their paid plans.

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