AuditRails vs. Datadog Audit Trail
Datadog's “Audit Trail” product is scoped to activity inside Datadog itself: who logged into Datadog, what dashboards or monitors changed. It's not scoped to events in your own application. If you're looking to log your product's user and system activity for SOC 2, GDPR, or another compliance framework, that's a different problem than what Datadog Audit Trail solves. Here's how the two actually compare.
| Dimension | AuditRails | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| What it logs | Your product's own events: logins, data access, admin actions, whatever your application emits via the SDK. | Activity inside the Datadog platform itself, such as who changed a monitor or who viewed a dashboard. Not your application's events. |
| Tamper-evidence | Per-tenant SHA-256 hash chain; any alteration to a past entry breaks the chain and is independently verifiable. | Datadog's own internal logging pipeline, not designed as a customer-facing tamper-evidence mechanism for your product's audit data. |
| Storage model | S3 with Object Lock (WORM) as the source of truth, plus hot and cold query stores. | Datadog's standard log retention and indexing, priced and configured like the rest of your Datadog logs. |
| Independent verification | Open-source verifier CLI (github.com/auditrails/verifier) recomputes the chain from an export, no AuditRails involvement needed. | No published customer-facing tool to independently verify log integrity. |
| Compliance framework mapping | Built-in control citations and evidence bundles for 8 frameworks, including DORA, GDPR, and NIS2. | General-purpose observability platform; no built-in compliance-framework mapping for customer audit trails. |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly plan, from €99.99/mo, plus usage overage, frameworks included. | Datadog's general log management pricing, based on ingested and indexed volume across your whole observability stack, not audit-log-specific. |
Why teams choose AuditRails
Teams choose AuditRails when the audit trail itself is the deliverable an auditor will review: a per-tenant hash chain, WORM-backed storage, and evidence bundles mapped to specific compliance controls, not general-purpose observability data repurposed after the fact.
When Datadog is the right tool
If what you actually need is visibility into changes made inside Datadog itself, who edited a monitor, who has admin access to your observability stack, Datadog Audit Trail is the right, purpose-built tool for that. It's not a substitute for logging your own product's compliance-relevant events, and it isn't meant to be; that's a different job.
Frequently asked questions
Does Datadog Audit Trail log my application's user activity?
No. Datadog Audit Trail logs activity that happens inside the Datadog platform, such as configuration changes, dashboard views, and user management within Datadog, not events from your own product. If you need to log your users' logins, data access, or admin actions for a compliance audit, that has to come from your own application via an SDK like AuditRails'.
Can I send my application's audit events to Datadog instead?
You can send general logs to Datadog's log management product, but they land in the same indexed, searchable store as the rest of your logs, without the tamper-evidence, such as hash chaining or WORM storage, an auditor specifically tests for on audit trail evidence.
Does Datadog offer any tamper-evidence for logs?
Datadog's log management is built for observability and troubleshooting, not evidentiary integrity. It doesn't offer a customer-facing cryptographic chain that proves a specific log entry hasn't been altered since it was written, which is the property SOC 2 and similar audits actually test for.
Do I need both Datadog and AuditRails?
Many teams run both, side by side. Datadog for observability, performance, and infrastructure monitoring, including its own Audit Trail for changes inside Datadog, and AuditRails specifically for the compliance-grade audit log of your product's own user and system activity.