Datadog is the observability platform most teams default to. Infrastructure monitoring, log management, APM, security, network monitoring, synthetic monitoring. If it generates telemetry, Datadog probably has a product for it. They’re a Gartner Leader. They have thousands of customers.
We didn’t build an observability platform. We don’t collect metrics, render dashboards, or store traces. We built a tool that reads the data your observability tools already collected and tells you what caused the problem.
They’re different layers. Most teams that use our tools also use Datadog (or Grafana, or New Relic). One collects the signals. The other interprets them.
What Datadog does
Datadog shows you everything about your infrastructure. Metrics, logs, traces, network traffic, user sessions, security events. You get dashboards, alerts, anomaly detection, and a search interface for exploring data.
Their Watchdog engine automatically detects anomalies and correlates signals across services. It’s good at telling you “something looks different.” Their newer Bits AI product (SRE agent) can investigate alerts and suggest root causes.
The platform is enormous. 750+ integrations. Products for every layer of the stack. If you need unified observability across cloud, containers, and applications, Datadog is the industry standard.
The trade-off: Datadog is expensive at scale. Per-host pricing for infrastructure, per-GB for logs, per-span for APM. A team with 100 hosts, moderate log volume, and APM easily spends $50,000-100,000/year. And all your data lives in Datadog’s cloud.
What we built
Our tools start after the alert fires. We don’t collect telemetry or build dashboards. SuperTerminal connects to your servers over SSH, runs diagnostic commands, and has the AI interpret what it finds.
These are two separate products. SuperTerminal is a macOS desktop app you open during an incident. The BitSentry Dashboard is a separate web product that does this automatically in the background by ingesting errors from Sentry and security events from Wazuh.
The output is a root cause with evidence, not a dashboard you have to interpret yourself.
Why they’re different
| Datadog | BitSentry | |
|---|---|---|
| Core function | Observability (metrics, logs, traces, dashboards) | Incident diagnosis (SSH investigation, AI interpretation) |
| Alert detection | Yes (anomaly detection, monitors) | No (uses alerts from your existing tools) |
| Dashboard/visualization | Yes (core product) | No |
| Log collection and storage | Yes (per-GB pricing) | No (reads logs in-place on your servers) |
| APM / tracing | Yes | No |
| SSH investigation | No | Yes |
| AI root cause analysis | Yes (Bits AI, newer product) | Yes (core product) |
| Background monitoring | Yes (continuous collection) | Yes (Dashboard worker, triggered investigation) |
| Data location | Datadog cloud | Your machine (SuperTerminal) or your deployment (Dashboard) |
| Pricing | Per-host + per-GB + per-span (scales with usage) | $7,200/year flat |
The real difference
Datadog gives you the data. You still have to figure out what it means.
When an alert fires, you open Datadog, look at the dashboard, check the logs, search for the error, try to correlate timestamps across services. That investigation still takes 20-40 minutes if the root cause isn’t obvious from the first dashboard you open.
SuperTerminal skips the dashboard. It SSHes into the server, pulls the relevant logs, checks the services, and has the AI connect the dots. Instead of you staring at a graph wondering “is that spike related?”, the AI tells you “the spike started at 23:47 when the connection pool hit its limit.”
When Datadog is the right tool
You need observability. If you don’t have metrics, logs, and traces being collected somewhere, you need Datadog (or a competitor). We don’t replace observability tooling. We read from it.
You need alerting. Datadog monitors are how most teams detect problems. Our tools don’t detect problems. They investigate them after detection.
You need dashboards for day-to-day operational visibility. We don’t give you a view of your infrastructure’s health. Datadog does.
When our tools make sense as an addition
You already have Datadog (or similar) and your problem is the time between “alert fired” and “found root cause.” Datadog detected the problem. SuperTerminal tells you why it happened.
Your logs are too expensive in Datadog. If you’re throttling log ingestion to control costs, you might have diagnostic data on your servers that never made it to Datadog. SuperTerminal reads logs in-place over SSH, so log volume pricing doesn’t apply.
You want investigation that doesn’t depend on Datadog being correctly configured. If the relevant metric wasn’t being tracked or the log wasn’t being ingested, Datadog can’t help. SuperTerminal goes to the source.
Try SuperTerminal
Free while in beta. Uses your SSH config and your own AI keys. Set it up in 5 minutes.