Metaplane is a data observability platform that monitors database tables for anomalies, schema changes, and lineage issues, alerting data teams before bad data reaches dashboards or downstream models. MIT graduate Kevin Hu founded the company in Boston in 2019 alongside former HubSpot engineers Peter Casinelli and Guru Mahendran, going through Y Combinator's Winter 2020 batch; Datadog acquired Metaplane in April 2025, and it now operates as 'Metaplane by Datadog' while continuing to sell as a standalone product.
The platform automates anomaly detection across monitored tables and traces column-level lineage so a broken metric can be traced back to its source table without manual detective work, then routes alerts to Slack, email, or Microsoft Teams. Pricing is usage-based, scaling with the number of tables under active monitoring for more than 30 days rather than a flat per-seat charge.
Metaplane fits data engineering and analytics teams running a modern data stack who need to catch data-quality problems before stakeholders do. A free-forever plan covers 10 monitored tables, automated anomaly detection, column-level lineage, and three custom SQL monitors; paid usage-based pricing applies above that threshold, with Enterprise terms negotiated separately.
