Monitoring and observability
Datadog is a hosted service; Prometheus has 2 supported release lines. Prometheus 3.15 reaches end of life on Nov 6, 2026. Datadog is a proprietary service; Prometheus is open source (Apache-2.0). OSV.dev lists 1 advisory from the last 12 months for Datadog’s dd-trace and 4 for Prometheus.
Last checked against Datadog Status, npm, deps.dev, OSV.dev, CISA KEV and endoflife.date.
Every value links to its source. Where a row doesn’t apply to one of them, the cell says why.
| Compared on |  Datadog |  Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| Support and releases | ||
| Supported release lines | Hosted service: no versions to upgrade | |
| Latest release | ||
| Releases in the last 12 months | ||
| Security | ||
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | ||
| OpenSSF Scorecard | ||
| Status and incidents | ||
| Status now | Operational | Self-hosted: no vendor status page |
| Incidents in the last 90 days | Self-hosted: no vendor status page | |
| Licence and hosting | ||
| Licence | Proprietary service Not open source SDK (dd-trace): Apache-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause. | |
| How you run it | Managed by Datadog; you run its agent and tracers | Self-hosted, or managed Prometheus-compatible services (Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Grafana Cloud) |
| Adoption | ||
| npm downloads last week | Not an npm package | |
| GitHub stars | Hosted service: no public repository | |
| Datadog | Prometheus |
|---|---|
| Supported release lines | |
Hosted service: no versions to upgrade | |
| Latest release | |
| Releases in the last 12 months | |
| Datadog | Prometheus |
|---|---|
| Advisories published in the last 12 months | |
| OpenSSF Scorecard | |
| Datadog | Prometheus |
|---|---|
| Status now | |
Operational | Self-hosted: no vendor status page |
| Incidents in the last 90 days | |
Self-hosted: no vendor status page | |
| Datadog | Prometheus |
|---|---|
| Licence | |
Proprietary service Not open source SDK (dd-trace): Apache-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause. | |
| How you run it | |
Managed by Datadog; you run its agent and tracers | Self-hosted, or managed Prometheus-compatible services (Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus, Grafana Cloud) |
| Datadog | Prometheus |
|---|---|
| npm downloads last week | |
Not an npm package | |
| GitHub stars | |
Hosted service: no public repository | |
Read across for what matters to you. Each answer comes from the data above or the project’s licence and hosting options.
| If you need | Datadog | Prometheus |
|---|---|---|
| An open-source licence | No: Proprietary service | Yes: Apache-2.0 |
| Someone else runs it for you | Yes: From Datadog | Yes: From Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and Grafana Cloud |
| You can run it on your own servers | No: Hosted only | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | Hosted: nothing to upgrade | 3.13 LTS is supported until Jul 31, 2027 |
| A public incident history | Yes: Status page with 90-day history | No: Self-hosted: it’s your uptime |
| Datadog | Prometheus |
|---|---|
| An open-source licence | |
No: Proprietary service | Yes: Apache-2.0 |
| Someone else runs it for you | |
Yes: From Datadog | Yes: From Amazon Managed Service for Prometheus and Grafana Cloud |
| You can run it on your own servers | |
No: Hosted only | Yes: Yes, it’s software you install |
| A long support window | |
Hosted: nothing to upgrade | 3.13 LTS is supported until Jul 31, 2027 |
| A public incident history | |
Yes: Status page with 90-day history | No: Self-hosted: it’s your uptime |
Comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform
Open-source monitoring and alerting toolkit
From StackPrism’s curated notes. Pricing isn’t covered here: it changes often, so check each vendor’s pricing page.
Prometheus is an open-source metrics system you run yourself, usually paired with Grafana for dashboards; Datadog is a hosted platform that collects metrics, logs and traces through its agent. The trade-off is running and scaling your own monitoring versus having a vendor run it.
Release lines and end-of-life dates come from endoflife.date, release counts from deps.dev’s publish dates, and advisories from OSV.dev, counted once per flaw even when it’s listed under several ids, and checked against CISA’s list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited. Status and incident history come from each vendor’s public status feed; licences from each project’s licence file or the vendor’s licensing page, linked in the table.
The data refreshes every few hours and the time it was checked is shown above. There’s no pricing and no overall winner: which one fits depends on your constraints. To see how the versions you actually run hold up, check your repo.
Paste a public GitHub repo and see what’s vulnerable, end of life or deprecated in it today. Free, no sign-up.