AWS X-Ray vs Datadog comparison

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AWS X-Ray

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Datadog and AWS X-Ray compete in monitoring and tracing. Datadog leads in integration and visualization, whereas AWS X-Ray excels in AWS ecosystem integration, catering to AWS-reliant organizations.

Features: Datadog includes comprehensive monitoring, extensive integrations, and real-time alerts. It offers anomaly detection to identify performance issues swiftly. AWS X-Ray provides deep insights into application requests through AWS-hosted services, facilitating AWS-specific tracing capabilities. Datadog's broad integrations enable flexibility, whereas AWS X-Ray's focus is on AWS services.

Room for Improvement: Datadog can enhance its APM support for various programming languages and optimize its dashboard customization features for non-technical users. Additionally, it may improve cost-effectiveness for smaller operations. AWS X-Ray could expand tracing support for non-AWS services and improve interfaces to be more user-friendly for non-AWS environments. Enhanced alerts customization and reporting features would also be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog offers streamlined onboarding with detailed documentation, making it easy to deploy across different environments. Its customer service provides robust support. AWS X-Ray’s tight AWS integration eases deployment for AWS users but might pose challenges elsewhere. Datadog offers broader flexibility, while AWS X-Ray simplifies deployment in AWS-specific infrastructure.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog's flexible pricing model may involve higher initial setup costs but offers strong ROI through customizable features. AWS X-Ray’s cost efficiency benefits AWS-focused organizations but requires careful consideration of AWS-related fees. Datadog’s ROI thrives on its versatility, while AWS X-Ray is cost-effective within AWS-centric companies.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS X-Ray vs. Datadog Report (Updated: January 2025).

AWS X-Ray vs. Datadog

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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

7.1

Number of Reviews

186

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 3.9%, up from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 9.9%, down from 11.8% 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.

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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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

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

"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 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."

"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."

"It is a very scalable solution."

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

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

"It brings in observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities - all of which we need to operate at scale."

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

"Datadog is easy to use and easy to deploy. It's a better solution compared to others on the market in terms of being budget friendly for our customers."

"The integration and configuration are incredibly simple. The SaaS offering is remarkably easy to set up, especially if you're coming from a Graphite environment or anything that uses a StatsD."

"The biggest thing I liked was the combination of all the things - monitoring, log aggregation, and profiling."

"I like that you can build out a dashboard pretty quickly. There are some things that come out of the box that you don't really need to do, which is great because they're default settings."

"We've found it most useful for managing Rstudio Workbench, which has its own logs that would not be picked up via Cloudwatch."

"Overall, the Data UI and the usability of customer features continue to improve."

More Datadog pros

Cons

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"It would be great if usage metrics were automatically created and we could create custom metrics, instead we ended up building some of our own stuff to track and alert on our own usage."

"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."

"It seems that admin cost control granularity is an afterthought."

"When it comes to storing the logs with Datadog, I'm not sure why it costs so much to store gigabytes or terabytes of information when it's a fraction of the cost to do so myself."

"We would really like to see more from the Service Catalog."

"This service could be less costly."

"One area where the product could be improved is Application Performance Monitoring (APM)."

"The more tools that they can build that allow you to run AWX playbooks, or other similar fixes, would benefit clients greatly."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."

"The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."

"It has a module-based pricing model."

"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."

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

"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."

"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."

"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

38%

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

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

AWS X-Ray

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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

AWS X-Ray vs. Datadog