AWS X-Ray vs Datadog comparison

Read 187 Datadog reviews

30,103 Views
18,351 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

AWS X-Ray

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 1, 2024

Datadog and AWS X-Ray are popular tools for monitoring and troubleshooting. Datadog wins with overall performance satisfaction, while AWS X-Ray is preferred for strong features despite higher costs.

Features: Datadog is praised for comprehensive monitoring, easy integration, and real-time analytics. AWS X-Ray stands out for detailed tracing capabilities and integration with other AWS services. Both products offer robust features, with AWS X-Ray having a slight edge in traceability and integration.

Room for Improvement: Datadog users suggest better cost management and enhanced support. AWS X-Ray users desire improved usability and more detailed documentation. Cost issues are more prominent with Datadog.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog is noted for straightforward deployment and responsive support. AWS X-Ray requires a more complex setup but benefits from existing AWS infrastructure. Datadog is easier to deploy, whereas AWS X-Ray integrates well with other AWS tools.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog has higher setup costs, but users see a good ROI due to its features and support. AWS X-Ray is cost-effective within the AWS ecosystem but may involve additional costs. Datadog's higher costs are offset by satisfied user reviews of ROI, while AWS X-Ray's pricing is more favorable within AWS environments.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS X-Ray vs. Datadog Report (Updated: December 2024).

Download the complete report

AWS X-Ray vs. Datadog

December 2024

Helped 817,354 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

AWS X-Ray

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

17th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Datadog

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

187

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th)

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 3.9%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 10.1%, down from 11.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Parth Solanki

Founder & CEO at Quicklead.io

Saves time, is relatively cheap, and helps find errors

If we get any error, we can go to X-Ray and get all the requests for a certain error in one place. It makes it easy to find the issue in your own product. You can look at logs and error logs and find loopholes. You can do direct queries to get specific requests over the course of a day. It's very good at error reporting and quite fast. You also get a lot of information, including IP addresses, user locations, et cetera.

Read full review

Kevin Palmer

DevOps/Security Principal at Raken

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has made it easier for us to trace the problems that we have with our requests and to monitor the timing of each step in each request we do in our endpoints."

"The error analysis capabilities of X-Ray are really good."

"The most promising feature of AWS X-Ray is that you can debug the issues through the proper logs. You can also get an analysis out of the logs for some use cases, though I have yet to try all the features of AWS X-Ray."

"AWS X-RAY identifies bottlenecks in terms of stability and performance and how long certain data lives in terms of response time and duration."

"AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process."

"The most important one is compliance. We're able to achieve our regulatory levels. We're able to achieve the security level that we need for the federal government."

"The most beneficial feature is that it shows a dashboard for performance intervals, which reveals latencies."

"It is a very scalable solution."

"The dashboards and the performance of the software have been great."

"The seamless integration between Datadog and hundreds of apps makes onboarding new products and teams a breeze."

"The server monitoring, service monitoring, and user session monitoring are extremely helpful, as they allow us to be alerted ahead of time of issues that users might experience."

"The most valuable aspect is for us to have everything in one place."

"The monitoring functionality, in general, and tagging infrastructure are great."

"The performance of Datadog is good."

"Being able to filter requests by latency is invaluable, as it provides immediate insight into which endpoints require further analysis and optimization."

"The initial setup was straightforward from my own experience, helping integrate within the application and service levels."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"Like most Amazon products, the user interface, configuration, and tuning aren't the easiest. That's the biggest reason why people tend to go to products like TerraForm and Terragrunt. We use TerraForm and Terragrunt. So, for setting things up and interacting with X-Ray, it's definitely the user interface that can be better."

"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements."

"It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java."

"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."

"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."

"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."

"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."

"What needs to be better in AWS X-Ray is the log filtering. Predefined filters could be helpful because the power of analytics comes from how you can filter the data. I also want to see more KPIs from AWS X-Ray."

"It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors)."

"I'd like to see better pricing and more integration in the next release."

"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."

"Datadog could have a better business analysis module."

"Lacks some flexibility in the customization."

"The incident management beta looks promising, but it is still missing the ability to automatically create incidents based on certain alerts."

"I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view."

"Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"As you develop a relationship with Amazon, your pricing gets lower. You get credits for the amount of the system you use, and then if you're the government, you can get government pricing. For commercial users, there's a hump when you go from small to medium to big enterprise. Small businesses can live pretty easily off the free tier in a lot of cases, but when you go from a medium to a big enterprise, it becomes more expensive on a per-user basis. I'd like to see that curve going in a different way where pricing can be driven down while people are trying to adopt the technology."

"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."

"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."

"They prefer monthly subscriptions."

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."

"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."

"The tool is open-source."

"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."

"Pricing is somewhat affordable compared to other solutions but in order to really lower the costs of other products you need to plan very carefully your resources usage, otherwise, it can get expensive real quick."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

817,354 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

37%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS X-Ray?

AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS X-Ray?

AWS X-Ray is very beneficial, however, it is expensive. It should be more cost-effective.

What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?

It should have X-Ray SDKs for different languages like Node.js, Python, or Java. It should also have custom annotations and better instruments for external API services. In addition to these, X-Ray...

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 ...

Azure Monitor vs AWS X-Ray

Comparisons

Sentry vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 15% of the time

Compared 13% of the time

New Relic vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 13% of the time

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 11% of the time

Grafana vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 9% of the time

More AWS X-Ray Competitors

Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 14% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 14% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

AppDynamics vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

More Datadog Competitors

Product Reports

Download AWS X-Ray product report

AWS X-Ray

November 2024

Download Datadog product report

November 2024

Learn More

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Overview

AWS X-Ray is a powerful debugging and performance analysis tool offered by Amazon Web Services. It allows developers to trace requests made to their applications and identify bottlenecks and issues.

With X-Ray, developers can visualize the entire request flow and pinpoint the exact location where errors occur. It provides detailed insights into the performance of individual components and helps optimize the overall application performance.

X-Ray integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, making it easy to trace requests across different services and identify dependencies. It also offers a comprehensive set of APIs and SDKs, enabling developers to instrument their applications and capture valuable data for analysis. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, AWS X-Ray is a valuable tool for developers looking to improve the performance and reliability of their applications.

Datadog is a comprehensive cloud monitoring platform designed to track performance, availability, and log aggregation for cloud resources like AWS, ECS, and Kubernetes. It offers robust tools for creating dashboards, observing user behavior, alerting, telemetry, security monitoring, and synthetic testing.

Datadog supports full observability across cloud providers and environments, enabling troubleshooting, error detection, and performance analysis to maintain system reliability. It offers detailed visualization of servers, integrates seamlessly with cloud providers like AWS, and provides powerful out-of-the-box dashboards and log analytics. Despite its strengths, users often note the need for better integration with other solutions and improved application-level insights. Common challenges include a complex pricing model, setup difficulties, and navigation issues. Users frequently mention the need for clearer documentation, faster loading times, enhanced error traceability, and better log management.

What are the key features of Datadog?

Graphs and Dashboards: Visualizes servers and infrastructure with customizable views.
Metrics: Offers deep insights into system performance and user behavior.
Log Management: Provides powerful analytics for logs and seamless log aggregation.
Unified Tagging: Facilitates organization and retrieval of metrics and logs.
APM and RUM: Enables application performance monitoring and real user monitoring for comprehensive insights.
Synthetic Testing: Allows the simulation of user interactions to test application performance.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

System Reliability: Helps ensure uptime and performance across cloud environments.
Proactive Issue Resolution: Assists in identifying and resolving issues before they impact users.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring and log management tasks.
Flexible Integrations: Adapts to various cloud services and infrastructure setups.
Real-Time Alerts: Provides timely notifications to address problems swiftly.

Datadog is implemented across different industries, from tech companies monitoring cloud applications to finance sectors ensuring transactional systems' performance. E-commerce platforms use Datadog to track and visualize user behavior and system health, while healthcare organizations utilize it for maintaining secure, compliant environments. Every implementation assists teams in customizing monitoring solutions specific to their industry's requirements.

Sample Customers

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow

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