# Source: https://docs.datadoghq.com/account_management/billing/pricing.md

---
title: Pricing
description: >-
  Understand Datadog pricing models and billing calculations for various
  products including Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Logs, and Synthetic Tests.
breadcrumbs: Docs > Account Management > Billing > Pricing
---

# Pricing

Datadog has many pricing plans to fit your needs. For more information, see the [Pricing](https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing) page. Unless otherwise stated in your order, Datadog calculates fees based on product usage during each calendar month. Here are the most common pricing units:

## Infrastructure monitoring{% #infrastructure-monitoring %}

- A **host** is a physical or virtual operating system instance. Each hour, Datadog records the number of unique hosts you are monitoring in the Infrastructure service.
  - On a high watermark plan (HWMP), the billable count of hosts is calculated at the end of the month using the maximum count (high-water mark) of the lower 99 percent of usage for those hours. Datadog excludes the top 1 percent to reduce the impact of spikes in usage on your bill.
  - On a hybrid monthly/hourly plan (MHP), Datadog charges your minimum monthly commitment, and for any host hours above that commitment, Datadog charges an hourly rate.
- A **container** is a self-contained operating environment that includes application software and limited operating system libraries and settings. Once every five minutes, Datadog records the number of unique containers you are monitoring in the Datadog Infrastructure service. Datadog charges monthly based on the fractional hours of monitored containers.
- A [**custom metric**](https://docs.datadoghq.com/metrics/custom_metrics/) is a single, unique combination of a metric name, host ID and any tags. Datadog charges based on the monthly average of unique custom metrics submitted to the Datadog Infrastructure service per hour.
- A **device** is a physical sensor comprising one or more single-board computers in a frame. Datadog records and charges for the number of devices and hosts you are concurrently monitoring in the Datadog Infrastructure service.
- An AWS **Fargate task** is a collection of containers setup through AWS's ECS container orchestration platform. Datadog records the number of task instances you are monitoring in the Datadog Infrastructure (or APM) service at five-minute intervals. Datadog aggregates the interval-based measurements at the end of the month and charges you based on the total number of hours your applications were run and monitored.

## APM{% #apm %}

- If an application running on a host (defined in Infrastructure monitoring) generates traces and submits them to the Datadog SaaS application, Datadog counts that host as one **APM host**.
  - On a high watermark plan (HWMP), Datadog meters the count of hosts hourly. The billable count of hosts is calculated at the end of the month using the maximum count (high-water mark) of the lower 99 percent of usage for those hours. Datadog excludes the top 1 percent to reduce the impact of spikes in usage on your bill.
  - On a hybrid monthly/hourly plan (MHP), Datadog charges your minimum monthly commitment, and for any host hours above that commitment, Datadog charges an hourly rate.
- An **Indexed Span** is an individual request against an individual service in your stack. Datadog charges based on the total number of spans indexed by [retention filters](https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/trace_pipeline/trace_retention/#retention-filters) within Datadog APM.
- An **Ingested Span** is an individual request against an individual service in your stack. Datadog charges based on the total number of gigabytes of spans ingested into Datadog APM.

You can put controls in place for both Indexed and Ingested span volumes. For more information, read the [Trace Ingestion](https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/trace_pipeline/ingestion_controls/) and [Retention](https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/trace_pipeline/trace_retention/) documentation.

## Database Monitoring{% #database-monitoring %}

- Datadog records the number of unique database hosts you are monitoring with Datadog Database Monitoring each hour.
  - On a high watermark plan (HWMP), the billable count of hosts is calculated at the end of the month using the maximum count (high-water mark) of the lower 99 percent of usage for those hours. Datadog excludes the top 1 percent to reduce the impact of spikes in usage on your bill.
  - On a hybrid monthly/hourly plan (MHP), Datadog charges your minimum monthly commitment, and for any host hours above that commitment, Datadog charges an hourly rate.
- Datadog charges based on the total number of configured [normalized queries](https://docs.datadoghq.com/database_monitoring/data_collected/#normalized-queries) being tracked at any given time.

## Log management{% #log-management %}

- A **log** is a text-based record of activity generated by an operating system, an application, or by other sources. Datadog charges for ingested logs based on the total number of gigabytes submitted to the Datadog Logs service.
- A **log event** is a log that is indexed by the Datadog Logs service. Datadog charges per million log events submitted for indexing at the rate designated for the retention policy you selected.

## Cloud SIEM{% #cloud-siem %}

- An **analyzed log** is a text-based record of activity generated by an operating system, an application, or by other sources analyzed to detect potential security threats. Datadog charges for analyzed logs based on the millions of events per month analyzed by the Datadog Cloud SIEM service.

## Synthetic monitoring{% #synthetic-monitoring %}

- An **API test** is an HTTP or HTTPS request against a single URL. Datadog charges per ten thousand API tests runs executed to the Datadog Synthetic Monitoring service.
- A **browser test** is a simulation of a scripted sequence of user actions on a web-based application using a virtualized web browser. Datadog charges per thousand browser tests executed to the Datadog Synthetic Monitoring service.

## Cloud Network Monitoring{% #cloud-network-monitoring %}

- Datadog records the number of **Cloud Network Monitoring** (CNM) hosts you are concurrently monitoring with the Datadog CNM service once per hour.
  - The billable count of hosts is calculated at the end of the month using the maximum count (high-water mark) of the lower 99 percent of usage for those hours. Datadog excludes the top 1 percent to reduce the impact of spikes in usage on your bill.
- Additionally, Datadog measures the total number of flows used by all CNM hosts per month. A **flow** is a record of traffic sent and received between a source (IP:Port) and destination (IP:Port), as measured over a five-minute time period.

## Real User Monitoring{% #real-user-monitoring %}

- A **session** is a user journey on your web application. It expires after either 15 minutes of inactivity, or 4 hours of continuous activity.

- Datadog collects all the pages visited by your end users along with the telemetry that matters: resources loading (XHRs, images, CSS files, JS scripts, etc), frontend errors, and long tasks. All of this is included in the user session. Datadog charges per one thousand (1,000) sessions ingested in the Datadog Real User Monitoring (RUM) service with the following distinction:

- [RUM Measure](https://docs.datadoghq.com/real_user_monitoring/rum_without_limits/): You are charged for the sessions that are tracked by the SDK and sent to Datadog.
- [RUM without Limits](https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/?product=real-user-monitoring#products): You are charged separately based on the volume of sessions that flow from the SDK into Datadog, and the volume of sessions you keep after the retention filters.

## Continuous Profiler{% #continuous-profiler %}

- Datadog records the number of unique Continuous Profiler hosts you are concurrently monitoring with the Datadog Continuous Profiler service once per hour.
  - The billable count of hosts is calculated at the end of the month using the maximum count (high-water mark) of the lower 99 percent of usage for those hours. Datadog excludes the top 1 percent to reduce the impact of spikes in usage on your bill.
  - Each host is allowed up to four profiled containers for free. Containers over this are priced at $2 per container. **Note**: This allotment is aggregated across all hosts so if you have four containers on average across all your hosts, you are not charged as if you have more on a host-by-host basis.
- Datadog measures the total number of containers that are being profiled. A container is a self-contained operating environment that includes application software and limited operating system libraries and settings. Once every five minutes, Datadog records the number of unique containers you are monitoring in the Datadog Continuous Profiler service. Datadog charges monthly based on the fractional hours of monitored containers. For Continuous Profiler, Datadog only counts the containers that are running the Continuous Profiler service towards the total monitored container count.

## Incident Management{% #incident-management %}

- For organizations on a seat-based plan, Datadog charges based on your organization's seat commitment.
- For organizations on the legacy usage-based plan, Datadog tracks the number of monthly active Incident Management users.
  - Datadog counts a user as an **active user** if they have used Datadog capabilities to contribute substantively to the incident response. For example, you become an active user for the month when you:
    - Update an incident's state, severity, or other fields
    - Comment on the incident's timeline
    - Send incident notifications
    - Add responders or assign responder types
    - Create, modify, or assign incident follow-ups
    - Generate a postmortem
  - You do *not* become an active user when you:
    - Declare, view, or search for incidents
    - Join third-party channels, meetings, or calls that are connected to the incident
    - Post messages in the incident's Slack channel or Microsoft Teams channel (even if the message is automatically synced to the incident timeline)

## CI Visibility{% #ci-visibility %}

- Datadog tracks the number of unique committers who send test and pipeline data to the CI Visibility service.
- A **committer** means an active git committer, identified by their git author email address. A committer is counted towards billing if they commit at least three times in a given month.
  - In the event that a pipeline is not associated with a git repository, or git metadata is unavailable, the username of the person triggering the pipeline execution is used as the billable committer.
- For Pipeline Visibility, every pipeline, pipeline stage, and pipeline job counts as a **pipeline span**. For Testing Visibility, every individual test run counts as a **test span**.

## Troubleshooting{% #troubleshooting %}

For technical questions, contact [Datadog support](https://docs.datadoghq.com/help/).

Contact [Sales](mailto:sales@datadoghq.com) or your [Customer Success](mailto:success@datadoghq.com) Manager to discuss hourly pricing or billing for your account.