We performed a comparison between AppDynamics vs Datadog based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: AppDynamics has an edge in this comparison because it received higher marks in the ease of deployment, pricing, and ROI categories.
"In AppDynamics, everywhere I go, there's some sort of grouping and aggregation function, or there's some sort of timeline that lets me zero in more quickly on the traces that I need. They go to more pains to aggregate and bubble the important ones to the top. That removes a lot of manual work."
"AppDynamics is easy to implement if you follow the documentation, and the documentation that they provide is good."
"AppDynamics has been stable."
"This is a stable product and we definitely plan to continue using it in the future."
"After a major incident, root cause analysis is conducted and, most of the time, we understand what caused the incident and how it can be prevented from happening again."
"We set up alerts recently so we can fix any issues more quickly in production."
"Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic."
"The SAP monitoring element is very helpful."
"Datadog helps us detect issues early on and helps in troubleshooting."
"It provides more cloud data. They tend to just get the way a service would be designed on the cloud."
"The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"Datadog has so far been a breeze to use and set up."
"Anything I've wanted to do, I found a way to get it done through Datadog."
"The platform appeals to companies spanning many industries on a global scale."
"Going from viewing a metric to creating a monitor alerting on a metric is very easy."
"If we have a large load for users using our basic Datadog, it will immediately fire off an alert notifying us either something's wrong or not."
"The solution could improve by covering more technologies. For example, it does support .NET Core applications. However, it could be a bit better."
"There are many KPIs that are not available in AppDynamics."
"An area that has room for improvement on the CR and ERP would be the addition of monitoring of the internal solution. For example, you can monitor the day-to-day and everything in the transactions with AppDynamics, but there's also a lot going on in the kernel itself that you cannot monitor. The automation needs to improve as well. As it stands, a lot of customization needs to happen before you can use AppDynamics."
"We constantly need to improve our alert mechanism because we get a lot of false-positive alerts. These are not real errors. In addition, for end-user monitoring, sometimes, we are not able to catch all user activities. Because of not being able to follow the user activity from the start to the end, we are missing out on the performance issues."
"There needs to be an option to capture all the sessions for all the users, not just samplings."
"AppDynamics is a solution that requires extra learning and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, automated reports would helpful similar to have they have in Google Analytics."
"As per my experience, the drill-down feature can be improved at the class level."
"We have had downtime, which has been the result of config, application, or cord issues."
"The pricing model could be simplified as it feels a bit outdated, especially when you look at the billing model of compute instances vs the containers instances."
"Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing."
"It seems that admin cost control granularity is an afterthought."
"I'm still exploring the trial version, and it is fine. One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report. This is something that could be improved. I probably need to navigate to a place to access the reports."
"The correlation between the logs and the metrics needs improvement as most cases, we might use another logging tool (that is cheaper in cost) which we then have to link together."
"The setup was a bit complex."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 155 reviews while Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while Datadog is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Splunk Enterprise Security, New Relic and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Splunk Enterprise Security. See our AppDynamics vs. Datadog report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors and best Container Monitoring vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
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 monitoring. We maintain critical processing on our mainframe so there was a desire to include this in our transaction trace. Due to a highly mature ELK implementation, we are not trying to incorporate log analytics into solution buy may consider in the future. We had AppD, Dynatrace, New Relic, and CA Wily all in house at the time of our evaluation. We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing. Between Dynatrace and New Relic, Dynatrace won based on the automation, integrated AI, support for "old" techs, and confidence we could eliminate multiple APM and infra monitoring tools.
I would not include products like BigPanda, MoogSoft, in this analysis. They are not monitoring solutions but event correlation solutions. You will need additional monitoring products to capture data and feed them. Having said that if you cannot consolidate tools you will likely need to purchase an event solution to make sense of all the alarms. We did evaluate these products but with Dynatrace AI did not feel the business value was there for the investment.
Here's a quick pro/con list on Dynatrace & New Relic from our analysis.
New Relic Pros: Insights is an awesome product and capability. Lots of capabilities and plugins to extend data collection. The APM dashboard is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Good training and documentation are available to support the product.
New Relic Cons: Requires lots of manual configurations to implement and support. Insights product requires an investment of time to achieve value. Licensing is a nightmare as there is virtually no transparency in what you are being charged for. Lack of solution to consolidate alerts across implementation other than significant investment in insights to manually achieve this.
Dynatrace Pros: Very simple to implement and maintain with out of the box automation which supports modern (cloud/Kubernetes) and "old" (mainframe). In-app chat is helpful. High integration of infra and APM data for full-stack observability and engineering. Topology and trace discovery is more reliable than other products or our CMDB. Synthetics are easy to set up for any user. AI-assisted problem analysis on the trace discovery streamlines troubleshooting. AI includes "events" in an analysis like VMotion, deployment events. Have not done yet but looking to leverage monitoring as code for a fully integrated and automated delivery pipeline. See keptn.sh open source project.
Dynatrace Cons: User SQL lacks some functions of NRQL for user analysis. Host, process, and service data is not available to query within the product. Alarm processing lacks some granular controls. The Plug-in library is less robust.
Good luck with your decision!
We are currently going through a paper-based analysis to select an Enterprise APM solution.
Our Contenders are
1. Dynatrace
2. Cisco(AppDynamics)
3. Broadcom DX-APM
Shortlisted based on existing relationships with other products and services they provide.
We discounted New Relic- despite their growing capability - as they are yet to enter the enterprise APM solution scene.
With regards to your response "We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing .." :
Will you be willing to expand on Appd - what was your experience and issues w.r.t licensing. These could help us with our evaluation. Much appreciated. Regards Adrian
Could you please share your requirements ? There are a lot tools can be added to the list. I spent almost 6 months to test and check many tools then I select eG enterprise.
Thanks