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reviewer2000472 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Engineering Manager at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Democratizes observability, great log searchability, and intuitive UI
Pros and Cons
  • "I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."
  • "One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line. I had really wanted to have team-level visibility for findings, since the team managing the resources has much more context and ability to resolve the issue, as the service owner. However, this has been added to the announcement in a recent keynote."

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution to manage security-related logs and metrics, as well as create detection rules for security events. I am a security engineer, so one area of interest is the CSPM product, giving us the ability to look at findings across the cloud environment. 

The great part about the Datadog security products is that they incorporate the context of the resources/hosts where the security event is found. This allows us to see exactly what is running on a host that we see as a security alert.

How has it helped my organization?

The greatest impact it has had is on the ability to democratize observability and put monitoring into the hands of the people. Teams can quickly get the information they need, without needing a bunch of training, since the UI is super intuitive and easy for beginners. This helps reduce time to resolution during incidents and gives context to developers quickly and easily. Context is really important since seconds matter when the ship is down, and you don't know why.

What is most valuable?

I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices. As a member of the security team, I find that I often need visibility into other teams' services in order to get a good picture of our security posture.

I also am a fan of the ability to easily create monitors and get alerts into Slack quickly, without too much overhead. For example, I often need to create monitors where I am not too sure where the baseline lies. Having the ability to create anomaly monitors makes this process much more straightforward. Anomaly monitors are great for a security team.

What needs improvement?

One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line. I had really wanted to have team-level visibility for findings, since the team managing the resources has much more context and ability to resolve the issue, as the service owner. However, this has been added to the announcement in a recent keynote. 

Buyer's Guide
Datadog
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Datadog. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
825,609 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

Personally, I've used it my entire time employed here, more than three years.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Plinio Moreira - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Engineer at Delfia
Real User
Great Logging, APM, and RUM capabilities
Pros and Cons
  • "The CCM, Workflows, Logs, APM, and RUM are all useful aspects of the solution."
  • "We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

I'm a Datadog partner in Brazil, and I monitor all my applications with Datadog too. I would like to enable all features in my DPN portal and get access to custom demos. We resell Datadog and a full stack of pre-sales, sales, and post-sales services. We have customers for all sectors, including governmental, financial services, services in general, telecom, et cetera. Today, we are the biggest Datadog partner in Brazil, and we are searching for an expansion in our MSP environment.

How has it helped my organization?

I resell all solutions in Datadog, so all features are important for our customers.
We are the biggest Datadog partner in Brazil, and we would like to expand our MSP environment.

What is most valuable?

The CCM, Workflows, Logs, APM, and RUM are all useful aspects of the solution. I resell all solutions in Datadog, so all features are important.

I'm a Datadog partner in Brazil, and I monitor all my applications with Datadog too. 

The solution works within all sectors, including, governmental, financial services, services in general, and telecom. 

What needs improvement?

We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved. In general, cloud users and microservices users like Kubernetes offer a faster improvement in the environment. Our users of the feature logs had a lot of benefits and found cost reductions also.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for three years. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used to use AppDynamics. We switched due to the fact that the cloud monitoring and K8 monitoring are not as good as Datadog.

What about the implementation team?

I'm a reseller.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing model is better, however, if they had the option to block consumption in the Infra and APM, that would help to keep better control of costs.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not evaluate other solutions.

What other advice do I have?

We use the solution as a SaaS.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Datadog
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Datadog. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
825,609 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Software Engineer at Sony Corporation of America
Real User
It is very easy to use and configure. It has a nice UI.
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "It has a nice UI."
  • "We have asked technical support questions, and sometimes they don't get back to us right away. Or when they do, it is not the right answer."

What is our primary use case?

If our app is up and running, we use it to monitor how many credits the app is using up on each node. We also monitor services by how long each call is taking with the help of EC2s off of application.

How has it helped my organization?

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. It provides us insights on our calls to other services, such as how long each call is taking and what is the whole stack trace.

What is most valuable?

  • It is very easy to use.
  • It is easy to configure.
  • It has a nice UI.
  • Datadog provides everything that we need.

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability is great. It has not come down. It is always up.

We do not put a lot of stress on it. It use for monitoring our app, and it's a pretty great product.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have an application in AWS running four nodes. It is not too large. Our user base is about 2000 users.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have asked technical support questions, and sometimes they don't get back to us right away. Or when they do, it is not the right answer. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Before Datadog, we had APM monitoring, which is something similar, but it wasn't as nice to use or as easy to configure.

How was the initial setup?

It is easy to configure. You load the Datadog agent into the EC2 instance, then you just follow it. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did not participate in the evaluation of the other products.

What other advice do I have?

If you are monitoring the metrics and insights in your application, and need help monitoring, then this is a great application to look into. The app is always available. It has a clean UI and provides the metrics that you will need. It is a good product.

Right now, we only using it on this one application.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2044965 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Great centralized dashboards and telemetry capabilities with a helpful visualization of performance metrics
Pros and Cons
  • "Datadog has proven to be easy to set up and legible for both development and operational teams."
  • "If there were a more cost-effective manner of deploying the tool, we'd be more likely to adopt it more widely."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for centralized dashboarding and telemetry viewing for teams across the organization. 

We're focused on ensuring that both development teams and leadership can reasonably gain insights into the status of various systems. 

At the end of the day, managing various dashboards and metrics aggregators like Prometheus, Kubernetes server, AWS Cloudwatch, and Grafana have lead to some confusion, and we've had issues with teams not knowing where their data exists and where they can view their system metrics. 

Datadog has proven to be easy to set up and legible for both development and operational teams.

How has it helped my organization?

The solution has been useful in generally ensuring that teams are able to better visualize and think about their application's impact on data centers/cloud performance. Having centralized tooling for observability means that each team can be on the same page when discussing monitoring. 

There have been some issues where teams have been unable to find metrics within the tool properly and some behaviors with the tagging and grouping functionality that seem not to be as easy to understand as one may expect. That said, overall, the experience has been one that is positive.

What is most valuable?

The dashboards have proven most helpful in ensuring that teams can track the performance of their apps. On a more practical scale, the alerts have proved invaluable for triaging and bringing services back online.

Being able to tie the alerts generated through Datadog monitors has allowed us to quickly and effectively respond to infrastructure and software issues that would have otherwise hamstrung the organization and prevented us from accomplishing our day-to-day tasks. This is naturally invaluable.

What needs improvement?

I'm sure that this is said all the time, however, the pricing model has led us to restrict the usage of the service. If there were a more cost-effective manner of deploying the tool, we'd be more likely to adopt it more widely. 

Aside from the cost, the nature of the tagging and grouping features within the monitoring dashboards have often caused headaches when creating new dashboards for aggregate services and infrastructure stacks. It would be nice to ensure that this feature is supported long-term and brought with easier accessibility.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for three years.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Datadog is easy to use and generally looks great from a customer standpoint. The ability to export metrics all into a central location was crucial.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Datadog is very expensive for smaller organizations. The pricing model might be restrictive until the organization reaches a certain size.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Primarily we did an evaluation of other providers, such as AWS and GCP, outside of in-house solutions.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2003937 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Intuitive with high availability and good integrations
Pros and Cons
  • "The network map is crucial in identifying bottlenecks and determining what needs more attention."
  • "To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."

What is our primary use case?

We are using the solution for scaling up the website for market data applications. EC2 and Datadog have enabled high-level monitoring of underlying infra and services.

The Datadog profiler comes in handy to pinpoint issues with resource utilization during peak hours, and traces/log management helps narrow down the root cause.

The network map is crucial in identifying bottlenecks and determining what needs more attention.

Host map helps identify problematic hardware and devise ways to counter issues that arise during scaling, and deploying solutions on the cloud.

How has it helped my organization?

While my team is relatively new to Datadog, I already see immense value in switching over to Datadog as the primary APM and NPM tool.

The arsenal of features it offers is bound to come in a clutch when facing production issues, and when finding out what went wrong is crucial.

The network map has helped to figure out the golden signals and optimize the infrastructure.

The synthetics have helped ensure the high availability of arch functions as intended.

What is most valuable?

The network map is useful. With it, we have the ability to see the data flow across the entire network path across all the applications is highly valuable as the data from this service helps identify network bottlenecks, non-performant applications, and bad endpoints.

This is especially crucial for a high-availability website aimed at market data applications where low latency is crucial.

The host map gives a clear picture of the entire infrastructure, and the ability to switch between logs, metrics, and traces is very handy when it comes to debugging issues on the fly.

I love the ability to install the integrations and agents quickly. This is a well-made product.

What needs improvement?

To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements.

My involvement with Datadog has largely been positive. I love the simplicity and intuitiveness it offers - even for nontechnical folks who just might be starting out with developing technical chops in their domain.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for three years.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2004021 - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Great for debugging with good UI and helpful filtering capabilities
Pros and Cons
  • "It is easy to navigate the menu and create tests."
  • "This service could be less costly."

What is our primary use case?

We use the product for recording loggers on our various services across different teams. For example, we use logs to keep track of info logs for events and error logs to catch exceptions. 

When users ask us to investigate a situation, we use logs to keep track of events and where the user's code traveled to. We also use synthetic testing and monitoring features to keep track of our many alerts in the production and QA environments.

How has it helped my organization?

We use Datadog mainly for debugging purposes. For example, we use it to navigate where the code trace is when an issue arises due to its ability to search through the logs. 

We also use it to address user queries. Sometimes users would ask us a certain question concerning our codebase, we use Datadog to track the code stack and also use time monitoring to get an idea of the time frame around when the use case happened.

What is most valuable?

The feature I have found to be the most valuable is the filtering feature in logs. It is really easy to type plus and minus to filter out different logs. I use it to navigate the noise. 

I use synthetic tests as well. It is easy to navigate the menu and create tests. 

Much of the UI is very straightforward, and I do appreciate the ability to search for any documentation on the various features when I need to as well. The DASH monitoring boards are nice to give an overview of various performances and allow us to track use cases.

What needs improvement?

This service could be less costly. Right now, we only keep 15 days worth of logs since we want to be more economical in terms of cost. It would be nice if I had the option to monitor logs beyond 15 days. For APM traces, we only keep a year worth of traces. The UI can be a little more straightforward as well. I found it to have too many options.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is good.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1652517 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager, Cyber Digital Transformation at a security firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Insightful and easy to use solution that makes application performance monitoring easy
Pros and Cons
  • "The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment."
  • "Their security features could be improved. We looked at their Security Monitoring feature but it was early in its development. Datadog are just getting into the security space so I'm sure this will improve in the future."

What is our primary use case?

We have used this solution primarily for application performance monitoring. To do this, we needed to make sure we had the right data in the system so that people could be able to monitor their applications end-to-end.

What is most valuable?

The infrastructure monitoring capabilities are really valuable. You can just log on and see everything that is happening within an IT environment.

What needs improvement?

Their security features could be improved. We looked at their Security Monitoring feature but it was early in its development. Datadog are just getting into the security space so I'm sure this will improve in the future.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is a stable solution. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This is a scalable solution. 

What other advice do I have?

To get started with this solution, I would recommend front-loading it with some sort of data or process and filter out to view only the information you need.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Reseller
PeerSpot user
reviewer2000271 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Developer at a pharma/biotech company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Great for logging and monitoring with useful RUM capabilities
Pros and Cons
  • "The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
  • "Even though it is powerful on its own, the UI-based design lacks elegance, efficiency, and complexity."

What is our primary use case?

We’re currently using logging, monitoring, metrics, APM, etc.

We've started to use e-SLOs, however, it takes a bit of time to work through those.

RUM has been very useful. I have used this in the past to debug problems in production, which has been g great.

We also want to start using synthetics and tracing more. 

Our application currently runs in many different environments based on our customers' requirements. This allows us to see everything in one place and filter by environment as required, which is extremely useful.

How has it helped my organization?

The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc. We've gone from almost nothing to something that didn’t take a lot of time to set up. It has been great since we had so little time to spare.

As a startup, we have limited resources, and no one has enough time for anything. The fact that there are so many easy integrations and configurations by YAML makes everything easy to set up without needing a full-time employee. Instead, we're just configuring monitoring solutions which are very desirable.

What is most valuable?

The product is very useful for tracking down anything that’s gone wrong. I’ve been using it to make sure everything is working correctly after deployment and to make sure we don’t suffer performance degradation. We've found it great for tracking down anything that’s gone wrong in real-time.  

The logs are helpful. They are necessary for any application. Prior to this, our solution would have been to SSH into a machine and tail log files. This, however, is untenable for many reasons, and one of the first things I wanted to change.

The RUM has been great. Seeing real users interacting with our website is quite helpful.

What needs improvement?

Sometimes it’s difficult to customize certain queries to find specific things, specifically with the logging solution. I’ve used other logging platforms in the past that have extensive and mature query languages. This might not be super friendly to start out with, yet can be very powerful. 

I wish there was more of an emphasis on query languages instead of the UI-based tooling that Datadog provides. Even though it is powerful on its own, the UI-based design lacks the elegance, efficiency, and complexity.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for six months or so.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I was previously familiar with Splunk.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don’t handle pricing or licensing aspects. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did not evaluate other options. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Datadog Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: January 2025
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Datadog Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.