Sentinel vs Datadog
Datadog does everything. The only question worth asking is whether you use enough of it to justify the invoice.
The honest version
Datadog is a genuinely complete platform — APM, logs, RUM, profiling, security, hundreds of integrations — and nothing here pretends Sentinel replaces it. If you correlate a trace to a log line to a host metric in a single query, Sentinel is not that product and will not become it. This page is for the teams using a few percent of Datadog — infrastructure monitors, two dashboards, alerts to Slack — and paying for the whole platform.
Side by side
No asterisks, and no rows invented to make one column look better.
So which one should you pick?
Stay on Datadog if
- You need APM, logs and traces correlated in one place.
- Your compliance requirements are already mapped to their certifications.
- Someone owns the platform internally and the budget is settled.
Try Sentinel if
- You use a small fraction of Datadog and pay for all of it.
- You want the monthly bill to stop being a variable.
- You want to know when things break without learning a platform first.
Or run both
You do not have to choose per company — you can choose per service. Keep Datadog where you genuinely need tracing and profiling, and put Sentinel on everything else: the internal tools, the cron jobs, the staging clusters, the quiet side services that each cost you a per-host licence. Datadog monitors can post to a webhook, so both stacks can feed the same status page.
Datadog → Integrations → Webhooks
name: sentinel-down
url: https://app.sentinel-app.io/api/v1/signals/
headers:
STNL-Access-Key: YOUR_KEY_ID
STNL-Secret-Key: YOUR_SECRET
payload: |
{"service": "$ALERT_TITLE", "status": 0,
"source": "datadog", "message": "$EVENT_MSG"}
# Duplicate it as sentinel-up with "status": 1, then route from
# the monitor message:
# {{#is_alert}}@webhook-sentinel-down{{/is_alert}}
# {{#is_recovery}}@webhook-sentinel-up{{/is_recovery}}Questions people actually ask
Is Sentinel a Datadog replacement?
For infrastructure and workload alerting, yes. For APM, log aggregation and distributed tracing, no — and it is not on the roadmap. Sentinel is deliberately the layer above the signals, not a warehouse for them.
What happens to my Datadog dashboards?
They stay in Datadog. Sentinel does not import them, and migrating dashboards is not the point — if you rely on custom dashboards every day, that is a sign Datadog is doing real work for you.
Where is my data stored?
In France, on Scaleway infrastructure. What is stored is health signals: a service, a status, a timestamp and whatever metadata your annotations add. No log content, no request payloads.
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