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Amazon CloudWatch vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon CloudWatch aids in monitoring, reducing manual work, and offers economic benefits with growing adoption during cloud migrations.
Sentiment score
7.1
Datadog enhances efficiency, reduces downtime, and improves ROI by tracking instances, visualizing trends, and resolving performance issues.
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.4
Amazon CloudWatch support is praised for responsiveness and expertise, though experiences vary; users find documentation useful for self-resolving issues.
Sentiment score
7.3
Datadog's customer service is proactive and knowledgeable, but technical support quality varies with occasional delays and inconsistencies.
In recent years, due to business expansion, knowledge levels among support engineers seem to vary.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.7
Amazon CloudWatch is highly rated for its seamless scalability and efficient performance handling diverse logs and systems.
Sentiment score
7.6
Datadog efficiently scales with infrastructure demands, offering seamless integration and reliability, though cost management is essential.
Amazon CloudWatch's scalability is managed by AWS.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon CloudWatch is reliable and stable, with minor delays in data display noted by some users, rating it highly.
Sentiment score
8.0
Datadog is praised for its reliable stability, minimal disruptions, quick issue resolution, and efficient large-scale data handling.
I sometimes notice slowness when Amazon CloudWatch agents are installed on machines with less capacity, causing me to use other monitoring tools.
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon CloudWatch users seek better integration, real-time monitoring, intuitive interfaces, and scalable solutions amid concerns over pricing and log issues.
Datadog users desire performance improvements, consistent APIs, clearer pricing, better support, enhanced features, and more user-friendly documentation and interface.
Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.
Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage.
The documentation is adequate, but team members coming into a project could benefit from more guided, interactive tutorials, ideally leveraging real-world data.
There should be a clearer view of the expenses.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon CloudWatch's pay-as-you-go pricing varies by usage, with costs from $25 to $350, plus storage fees.
Datadog offers flexible, usage-based enterprise pricing, focusing on host count and log ingestion, requiring careful management to control costs.
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline.
The setup cost for Datadog is more than $100.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon CloudWatch offers real-time monitoring, detailed metrics, and seamless AWS integration, appreciated for its scalability and user-friendly interface.
Datadog excels with integration, customizable dashboards, and monitoring, offering streamlined setup, centralized data, and enhanced user insights.
Amazon CloudWatch allows me to set up and view even historical logs, which is one of the features I find valuable.
I like its filtering capability and its ability to give the cyber engine insights.
Our architecture is written in several languages, and one area where Datadog particularly shines is in providing first-class support for a multitude of programming languages.
The technology itself is generally very useful.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
13th
Ranking in Log Management
14th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
188
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 2.7%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 11.0%, down from 13.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Rasanpreet Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Reliable AWS monitoring and logging
The choice of logging solution should always be determined by the specific business requirements. It is crucial to align the logging strategy with what type of logs are needed and how they should be used. There are instances where we require custom solutions to retrieve logs, especially application logs that may not be easily accessible through CloudWatch or similar services. When we heavily rely on AWS native services, CloudWatch is indeed a robust choice. However, in certain scenarios, we might need integration capabilities with other tools, and if they can incorporate such features, it would enhance overall logging capabilities. I would rate it eight out of ten.
Kevin Palmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
5%
Educational Organization
37%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline, which I see as a disadvantage given the price.
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage. Another aspect that needs improvement is the look and feel of custom dashboards, which currently do not matc...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,194 professionals have used our research since 2012.