High cost, short retention
To control the bill, teams drop retention to 7 or 3 days and exclude noisy sources. Then the log an engineer needs is gone from search.
Cut yourDatadog billby up to 90%without removing Datadog.
- Search your Datadog logs directly in your S3, in milliseconds.
- Index only what your alerts use in Datadog.
- Set up in 5 minutes with read-only access.
See what you'd save on Datadog
Move the two sliders. The saving shown is after paying for CtrlB.
1,000 GB
50 GB10 TB
100%
10%100%
Datadog list prices, annual plan, 30 days of retention, about 1 KB per log. With CtrlB, Datadog still ingests every log and indexes 5%. CtrlB Pro is $0.20 per GB with 30 days of retention included.
You save per year$793,87584% less than Datadog alone, every log still searchable
Datadog today$949,000
Datadog with CtrlB$155,125
Datadog charges 25x more to search a log than to receive it
Datadog charges $0.10 per GB to ingest logs and $2.50 per million log events to keep them searchable for 30 days. So the bill grows with every log you index, and teams cut the logs they need later.
Where the money goes for each GB of logs
Ingest it$0.10
Keep it searchable for 30 days$2.50
25xIndexing, not ingestion, is most of your Datadog log bill. About 1 KB per log, so a million logs is about a GB.
Slow, capped, billed again
Archived logs have to be indexed again before you can search them, up to 1 billion events per job, and you pay to scan and index them.
Cheaper storage, no monitors
Lower storage costs come with trade-offs. Monitoring isn't included with Flex Logs, search compute is billed separately, and archived S3 logs can't be searched.
How it works.Search everything in your Object Storage bucket.
CtrlB reads your Datadog data two ways: from the archive Datadog already writes to your S3, and live from the Datadog Agent. Each works on its own. Use either one, or both. Datadog keeps running your alerts and dashboards either way.
Archived data
Make your Datadog archive searchable
Datadog already writes every log it receives to your S3 . Paste the bucket into CtrlB and grant read-only access. Months of logs become searchable in milliseconds, with no rehydration.
and, or instead
Live data
Send live data from the Datadog Agent
Add CtrlB as a second destination in datadog.yaml and restart the Agent. Logs, traces and metrics now reach CtrlB as well as Datadog, through Agent dual shipping .
Either way, Datadog can index less
Datadog only needs indexed data for monitors, dashboards and recent debugging. Once the rest is searchable in CtrlB, turn indexing down with settings you already have. The archive covers your logs. Live data also covers traces and metrics.
- Logsexclusion filters
- Tracesretention filters for spans
- MetricsMetrics without Limits for tags
Get a Datadog Cost Assessment
In 30 minutes, we'll review your Datadog deployment, identify what's driving your bill, and show how much of it CtrlB can take off.
- A 30-minute call with a CtrlB engineer
- Your Datadog log volume, indexing and retention, line by line
- A plan for what to keep indexed in Datadog
- No credit card required
Your Datadog setup stays. The bill goes down.
Stays in Datadog
- Monitors and alerts, on the logs you keep indexed
- Dashboards and log-based metrics, which Datadog builds from every log it ingests
- APM, infrastructure and on-call
- The Datadog Agent and your pipelines, untouched
Gets better with CtrlB
- Every archived log searchable in milliseconds
- No rehydration jobs when you need older logs
- Excluded logs still searchable, so cutting cost doesn't cut coverage
- Search from CtrlB, Grafana or AI agents through the CtrlB MCP server
Your logs stay in your S3
CtrlB searches the archive where Datadog already writes it. Nothing is copied to another vendor to make it searchable.
Read-only access
A read-only IAM role. CtrlB can't write to, change or delete your archive.
Revoke any time
Access lives in your AWS account. Remove the role and access ends.
Runs where you need it
Use CtrlB as a managed service, or deploy it in your own cloud account or VPC.
Built for investigations
CloudTrail, WAF, VPC flow and DNS logs stay searchable while the incident is still open.
Questions before you connect
Do we have to remove Datadog?+
No. Datadog keeps your monitors, dashboards, APM and on-call. It indexes fewer logs, and CtrlB answers the searches across everything Datadog archives to your S3.
What access does CtrlB need?+
A read-only IAM role on the S3 bucket your Datadog Log Archive writes to. CtrlB cannot change or delete anything in that bucket, and you can revoke the role at any time.
Will our monitors and dashboards keep working?+
Yes. Monitors keep running on the logs you keep indexed, and Datadog builds log-based metrics from every log it ingests, indexed or not.
How fresh is the data in CtrlB?+
Datadog uploads archive files to your bucket every few minutes, and CtrlB searches them as they land. The last few minutes stay in Datadog, where live alerting happens.
Does it work for security logs?+
Yes. CloudTrail, WAF, VPC flow, DNS and audit logs that Datadog archives are searchable in CtrlB, so an investigation can look back without a rehydration job.
What does CtrlB cost?+
The Free plan covers up to 150 GB a month with 14 days of retention. Pro is $0.20 per GB with 30 days of retention included. Enterprise pricing is based on your volume and retention.
See your Datadog archive searchable in one call
Book 30 minutes with an engineer. Bring your archive bucket, and leave with every log searchable and a plan to cut what Datadog indexes.