Stop searching dashboards. Start seeing your system.

The Dashboard Multiplication Problem

More products. More dashboards. More context switching.

• 26 products (source: Datadog Q1 2026 earnings call, verified 2026-06-01), each with its own dashboard, billing dimension, and learning curve.
• Context switching at 3am: alert, then infrastructure dashboard, then APM traces, then log explorer, then profiling. Each tab is lost time.
• 5 weeks per year lost to context switching (source: Harvard Business Review, 2022, "How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications").

See Your System, Not Dashboards

Topology as your primary investigation surface.

• Spatial observability: your services, their relationships, and their telemetry as a navigable 3D model of system reality, not a wall of 2D panels.
• When something breaks, you see it in context: which service is affected, what it depends on, where the blast radius propagates, seen rather than reconstructed from a dozen correlated charts.
• No tab switching. No mental model reconstruction. Your system, un-compressed into a space you move through.
• What Datadog does not have: no spatial observability, no 3D representation of system reality. Datadog ships a 3D geomap chart option (geographic data on a globe) inside its dashboard widgets (source, verified 2026-06-21), and at DASH 2026 (June 9-10) it launched 100+ capabilities (source, verified 2026-06-21), none of them a spatial view of your system.

Architecture: Zero Agents, One URL to Leave

Built on OpenTelemetry, with a real exit.

IAPM is built exclusively on OpenTelemetry. There are zero proprietary agents to install, license, or maintain: you point standard OTel SDKs and the OTel Collector at us over OTLP. Because nothing in your instrumentation is IAPM-specific, leaving is a one-line change: point the exporter endpoint somewhere else and your telemetry follows you. That exit is the architecture, not a marketing promise.

We do not claim Datadog locks you out of OpenTelemetry. That is no longer true. Datadog ships the Datadog Distribution of the OTel Collector (DDOT), built natively into the Datadog Agent, with OTLP ingest, a DDOT gateway for pipeline governance, and OTel-native metrics monitoring (source, verified 2026-06-21). OTel support on Datadog is mature. The difference is not whether Datadog speaks OTel. It is that Datadog's deepest value still runs through the Datadog Agent and Datadog-specific tooling, so the data you collect their way tends to stay their way, whereas IAPM adds nothing you would have to unwind to go.

AI: Tessa vs Bits AI

Human on the loop.

Tessa connects your production telemetry to your codebase. Add your repositories as workspaces, and Tessa traces a production issue from your 3D topology straight to the source file, then makes the fix.

Your code stays in your workspace. You review the changes. You commit when ready. Tessa does the work; you own the outcome.

Datadog's Bits AI provides investigation summaries and explains what happened. When the investigation is done, you still context-switch to your IDE to make the fix. Tessa closes that gap.

Pricing: The Full Picture

Scenario: 40 nodes, 10 engineers.

Datadog prices each capability separately. APM, infrastructure, logs, and AI are all separate line items with separate billing models.

Run Both. Migrate Gradually.

Same telemetry, two destinations, zero re-instrumentation.

• Dual-destination: Your OTel Collector fans out telemetry to both IAPM and Datadog simultaneously.
• No code changes: If you already use OTel SDKs, your instrumentation does not change.
• If you use dd-trace: Keep dd-agent for legacy services. New services start with OTel + IAPM. Migrate at your own pace.
• Exit guarantee: If IAPM is not right for you, change one endpoint URL. Your instrumentation stays exactly the same.