Unified platform and dedicated support provides advantages over open-source tools
To solve these challenges, Patronus AI enrolled in the Datadog for Startups program. The decision was made easier because several of its senior engineers had positive experiences with Datadog at previous companies. "Others had heard that Datadog was easy to set up and genuinely useful, which made getting buy-in much easier compared to other observability tools that tend to get more mixed reviews or are harder to maintain," says Joshi.
The Datadog for Startups program provided credits and a defined trial window that allowed Patronus to stress-test all core products without financial risk, then scale usage confidently. "As a startup, you don't know how your product's going to change, and what you need from an observability tool," explains Joshi. "The startup program is a big part of why we said, 'let's try out Datadog and see if the value it provides us matches what we would pay for it,' because that's a really hard thing to understand."
“As a startup, you don't know how your product's going to change, and what you need from an observability tool... Datadog for Startups gave us the breathing room to evaluate Datadog products without getting bogged down by cost or maintenance concerns.”
Patronus AI replaced fragmented observability tools with Datadog's unified Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, and Log Management, which brought metrics, traces, and logs into a single view, eliminating the need for engineers to jump between different tools and providing complete system visibility. This, along with dedicated support, provided Patronus AI with significant advantages over open source solutions.
To address its manual instrumentation challenges, Datadog APM's auto-instrumentation automatically captures API calls, database queries, and service interactions with zero code changes. This freed up the engineering team to focus on building product features.
Datadog also helped Patronus AI engineers address their challenges around error noise and lack of trace-to-log correlation. Datadog's Log Management combined with Trace Search and Analytics allows engineers to pivot from a high-level trace directly into the exact log lines that triggered an issue, making debugging faster and more efficient.