Rootly vs. Datadog

Not for observability. Datadog collects and visualizes your metrics, logs, and traces, and Rootly doesn’t. Rootly replaces what happens after the alert fires: on-call, incident response, AI investigation, status pages, and retrospectives. Most Rootly customers on Datadog keep it as their observability platform and send its monitors to Rootly.

Both can declare incidents, assign roles, run them in Slack, and generate retrospectives. The difference is where the work lives and what it can see. Datadog Incident Management is part of the Datadog platform and works best when your alerts and telemetry are in Datadog. Rootly is a dedicated incident platform that runs the response in Slack or Microsoft Teams, takes alerts from any monitoring tool, and investigates across all of them, Datadog included.

Datadog monitors send alerts to Rootly through a webhook, where they page on-call, open incidents, or trigger workflows. Workflows can create a Datadog notebook, capture a graph snapshot, or attach a dashboard to the incident timeline. Rootly AI SRE connects to Datadog’s hosted MCP server with read-only access, so investigations can query your Datadog logs, metrics, APM traces, monitors, RUM, and database monitoring.

Bits Investigation is strong inside Datadog: it starts from Datadog monitors and reasons over Datadog telemetry. Its third-party data sources, such as Grafana, Sentry, and Splunk, are in Preview. Rootly AI SRE treats Datadog as one source among many, alongside tools like Grafana, New Relic, Sentry, Splunk, Dynatrace, GitHub, and Confluence, and it can start from any alert Rootly receives. Every finding comes with its evidence and a confidence level, and the model can’t declare a root cause on its own.

If your team is small, every alert comes from a Datadog monitor, and responders are happy to work inside the Datadog app, Datadog On-Call and Incident Management cover the basics with the fewest moving parts. Teams usually add Rootly when alerts come from more than one tool, when the response needs to run in Slack or Teams for the whole company, or when retrospectives and follow-ups need to be tracked through to completion.

Because the two fail together when they share a platform. The tool that pages your team, coordinates the response, and updates your customers is most needed when something in your stack is degraded, so it should run independently of what it watches. Rootly runs on its own multi-region infrastructure with a 99.99% uptime SLA and takes alerts from every monitoring tool you use, so the response doesn’t depend on any one of them.

Yes. Point the Datadog monitors for a pilot team at Rootly’s webhook while the rest keep paging through Datadog On-Call, then move teams over in batches once they trust the page. Rootly supports dual-running during the transition, and most teams are live within a week.

As listed on Datadog’s pricing page in October 2026, billed annually: On-Call is $20 per seat per month, Incident Management is $30, and the two together are $40. Bits Investigation, Bits Chat, and Bits Code draw on AI credits, sold at $500 per 500-credit bundle per month, and unused committed credits don’t roll over. Workflow Automation is metered per execution, except workflows triggered by Incident Management or On-Call, which are included.

Incident Response is $20 and On-Call is $20 per user per month, or $40 for both at list price. AI SRE requires Incident Response and is priced on request, Enterprise pricing is custom, and the free trial typically lasts two weeks. See Rootly pricing.

Yes. Rootly runs the incident natively in Slack and Microsoft Teams: declaring incidents, creating channels, paging on-call, running workflows, starting meetings, and updating stakeholders, without switching to a separate interface.

Connecting Datadog takes minutes: point your monitors at Rootly’s webhook and add the AI connector. Most teams are live on Rootly within a week, with a dedicated support channel throughout.