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reviewer2004198 - PeerSpot reviewer
Devops Engineer II at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Real User
Great CPU profiler and lots of features but can be overwhelming
Pros and Cons
  • "Even if we don't end up using Datadog, it revealed problems and optimizations to us that weren't obvious before."
  • "The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."

What is our primary use case?

We use the solution for monitoring our logs across distributed clusters. Right now, we have an Elasticsearch solution that is tied to each platform (our product is a PaaS solution). 

We are looking at moving to a single pane of glass solution, which Datadog would be good for (plus, we could wrap up other tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Pagerduty, Pingdom, and more). We want to be able to have Datadog running on one single cluster and ingesting and processing logs from all our distributed clusters.

How has it helped my organization?

So far, we are just in the evaluation stages so it's hard to say how it's improved out organization. However, one positive impact it had is it's been just showing us an example of how to build in observability, metrics, tracing, etc., in a better way. 

Even if we don't end up using Datadog, it revealed problems and optimizations to us that weren't obvious before. One potential reason why it may not help us is that we have strict rules around log parsing and may not be able to send it to an external organizaton for ingestion/processing.

What is most valuable?

The CPU profiler has been interesting even though it isn't our core use case. 

We are finding that Datadog has way more offerings than originally expected, so we are constantly finding new parts of it that would be convincing to use. 

The log and ingestion are very similar to our current Elasticsearch setup. We find the tracing and overall integration/ecosystem to be the most valuable part. Basically, the CPU profiler is a good example of a value add for a problem we knew we had yet was low priority and had hacky workarounds. The value proposition is in the ecosystem as a whole.

What needs improvement?

The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming. 

The solution requires better overarching UI, which would make things clearer. Even though I generally dislike the AWS UI, it makes the different services very clear, and it also makes where you are at any given point clear. 

The sidebar for all the different services is a bit much. 

I also found the tagging of logging pipelines to be a bit tedious. It would be great if, once marked up, it would automatically be a first-class citizen in Datadog.

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For how long have I used the solution?

We are still in the evaluation stage and have used it less than one month.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability looks good so far.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It seems easier to scale and build app functionality across multiple teams rather than other solutions.

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

We have used Elasticsearch, Grafana, and Prometheus. We are still evaluating Datadog.

What was our ROI?

The product has provided good ROI by saving development time as well as time managing setting up ES.

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

It is somewhat expensive compared to open-source options.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated Elasticsearch, Grafana, and Prometheus. We are still evaluating Datadog.

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: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: evaluator
PeerSpot user
reviewer2004201 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Real User
Industry-standard with good profiling and helpful alerts
Pros and Cons
  • "The biggest thing I liked was the combination of all the things - monitoring, log aggregation, and profiling."
  • "It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features."

What is our primary use case?

We use different tools for log collection and monitoring. Using Datadog will combine different use cases into one product that will be easier to manage. 

The tools we use are open-source, so there is no commercial support. Having customer support would be ideal since we're a small team. 

Profiling would be another great feature to have. Currently, it's manual. Having Datadog would give us a standard, and we don't have to do much manual work.

How has it helped my organization?

It will solve a lot of our problems. We have different tools for each of them in our organization; they are open-source and therefore not very well maintained with there is no customer support. 

Having an industry-standard product such as Datadog would be ideal for us as we are short on manpower. Since this is a managed all-in-one product with readily available support, we will be able to focus on application logic rather than figuring out why a tool isn't working.

What is most valuable?

The biggest thing I liked was the combination of all the things - monitoring, log aggregation, and profiling. We have different tools for each of them in our organization and all of them are open-source. These are not very well maintained and there is no customer support. 

Having an industry-standard product is ideal for us as we are short on manpower. Profiling is another amazing feature. Currently, we rely on some open-source solutions, and it's all done locally. Having it done on Kubernetes would give us more insights and help with performance. Alerting is again a nightmare for us. Datadog solves all of these issues.

What needs improvement?

It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features. The UI could certainly be improved. Having less information with better organization could help newcomers. I haven't seen the documentation, however, a well-organized documentation would invite many varied users.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for three years.

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
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Datadog
January 2025
Learn what your peers think about Datadog. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2025.
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reviewer2003934 - PeerSpot reviewer
SRE at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Great for log aggregation, searching, and system monitoring
Pros and Cons
  • "The ability to easily drill down into log queries quickly and efficiently has helped us to resolve several critical incidents."
  • "Datadog could always lower the price!"

What is our primary use case?

We are using Datadog for server metrics, log aggregation and searching, system monitoring, alerting the team about errors, and dashboards for our developers. It's used by the Site Reliability Engineering team and Management of all levels. 

It's assisting us in proving SOC II compliance. 

We're looking to improve our usage of Datadog's RUM and APM components to get better and more performance insights on our production environments. 

We're also looking to leverage more synthetic monitors and runbooks for anyone responding to incidents.

How has it helped my organization?

The ability to easily drill down into log queries quickly and efficiently has helped us to resolve several critical incidents so far this year, and we heavily rely on a series of dashboards showing us various queues and load on CPU and memory for servers. 

We also have a view of the information required when we begin the patch and/or upgrade processes. 

I've also set up several monitors to alert the Site Reliability Engineering team when various metrics show a server might be reaching capacity. We use it to send an email suggesting we increase the size of the cloud instance.

What is most valuable?

The ability to easily drill down into log queries quickly and efficiently has helped us to resolve several critical incidents. We heavily rely on dashboards that are showing us various queues and load on CPU and memory for servers. 

We also have a view of the information required when we begin the patch and/or upgrade processes. 

I've arranged several monitors to alert the Site Reliability Engineering team when various metrics show a server that might be reaching capacity. We use it to send an email suggesting we increase the size of the cloud instance.

What needs improvement?

Datadog could always lower the price! In general, more demos online and maybe more free hands-on tutorials for basic functionality would be good for less technical users. 

I would also prefer more chances to amend the contract more than twice a year. As a smaller but growing company, it can be difficult to adequately predict demand.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for more than three years.

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
reviewer2004069 - PeerSpot reviewer
support Eng
Real User
Helpful dashboards with a good cloud security posture manager and cloud workload security
Pros and Cons
  • "It helps us better manage our logs."
  • "They should continue expanding and integrating with more third-party apps."

What is our primary use case?

We use the application for our application monitoring, data security monitoring, and log management. What we like about the application is that it helps us to track issues more proactively instead of reactively.

There are other improvements we would like to see.

1. Being able to restrict users from seeing or viewing specific dashboards once they log in

2. They can cut down the prices for Cloud SIEM. It seems very useful, however, the prices are high. Some organizations are finding it difficult to make decisions in terms of getting the tool.

How has it helped my organization?

We use the application for our application monitoring, data security monitoring, and log management. It helps us to track issues proactively instead of reactively.

It helps us better manage our logs.

We can effectively track down issues.

We have dashboards that give us an overview of our environment.

What is most valuable?

The tools I have found useful include the Datadog cloud security posture manager and cloud workload security.

What needs improvement?

Datadog is a great tool, and we value the services they offer. They should continue expanding and integrating with more third-party apps.

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?

I love its stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is very scalable.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support has been great.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We previously used AWS.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is not too complex.

What was our ROI?

We've seen an ROI of 50%.

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

It's a little pricy yet worth it.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not previously evaluate another solution.

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
reviewer2003469 - PeerSpot reviewer
SRE at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
Real User
Customizable, secure, and helps with managing content
Pros and Cons
  • "The platform appeals to companies spanning many industries on a global scale."
  • "There is always room for improvement when dealing with cloud-based technologies. Mainly, I would say, it's just increasing our offerings to attract various other types of industries and businesses across more fields."

What is our primary use case?

We use an enterprise version of a CMS platform which is enabling businesses to transmit content to their customers. The tool is fully customizable to the end user, including out-of-the-box integrations as well as APIs for custom plugin support. 

Our systems fully manage content using AWS as the back-end cloud provider. Assets are kept in secure buckets and utilize the Kubernetes infrastructure to deliver our product to end users and internal authors. Using the CMS allows for business people to manage content without needing development efforts.

How has it helped my organization?

This tool is the sole purpose of my company and the solutions we provide around it. Enabling customers to manage their content in a fast, reliable, and highly user-friendly setup has been critical to our success. 

Offering our product at SaaS, PaaS, cloud, and on-prem editions has enabled us to provide a solution for all types of customers. 

The platform appeals to companies spanning many industries on a global scale. 

Being based in SUI allows us to secure both the EU and other companies more easily.

What is most valuable?

The enterprise version of a CMS platform enables businesses to transmit content to their customers. 

The tool is fully customizable to the end user, including out-of-the-box integrations as well as APIs for custom plugin support. 

The content is fully managed within our systems using AWS as the back-end cloud provider. Assets are kept in secure buckets, and we can utilize the Kubernetes infrastructure to deliver our product to end users and internal authors. 

Using the CMS allows for business people to manage content without needing development efforts. Allowing this type of setup for business users has been a key reason for our success.

What needs improvement?

There is always room for improvement when dealing with cloud-based technologies. Mainly, I would say, it's just increasing our offerings to attract various other types of industries and businesses across more fields. 

New features as requested by our existing customers will help make the product better.

For how long have I used the solution?

The product was self-developed.

What other advice do I have?

We use a SaaS deployment. 

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
reviewer2000451 - PeerSpot reviewer
SRE at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Great visibility, easy to implement, and offers the ability to set thresholds
Pros and Cons
  • "It has provided visibility with ease of implementation and allowed multiple teams to quickly onboard it."
  • "Federated views for Datadog dashboards are critical as large companies utilize multiple instances of the product and cannot link the metrics or correlate the metrics together. This stunts the usage of Datadog."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for observability, metrics, logs, tracing, and end-to-end user flow monitoring. 

We are looking to implement this as a company-wide standard for cloud solutions.

At this time, we're currently in a POC, and we're interested in using either a Datadog agent or the OTel agent with a Datadog exporter. We have dashboards with panels that correlate metrics and allow you to link through to traces. Flame graphs to show latency across services and the various spans. 

While we are not security minded, we still require it and are interested in more. It's used for monitoring critical systems.

How has it helped my organization?

It has provided visibility with ease of implementation and allowed multiple teams to quickly onboard it. This provided a standard way to approach observability and visibility. 

Monitoring rules and alerting thresholds can also be set and exported to other teams for use. 

There is an issue with federated dashboards, as multiple teams running on different Datadog instances cannot use features like the service catalog or easily switch between services in a long business flow.

What is most valuable?

The K8 monitoring is extremely useful in Datadog. Preset dashboards that it provides help to speed up the work. 

The metrics summary is useful. Tracing with a span breakdown is helpful for us. We like the dashboarding with power packs and logging correlation with traces and logs. 

The Flame graph for tracing helps determine where the latency is the highest. 

Dashboards are created as a standard set and then exported into other Datadog instances for other teams. 

These dashboards would be updated regularly and pushed out to the teams. Unfortunately, there is no way to automatically push or deploy code in a quicker way. Each team I work with has its own Datadog instance.

What needs improvement?

Federated views for Datadog dashboards are critical as large companies utilize multiple instances of the product and cannot link the metrics or correlate the metrics together. This stunts the usage of Datadog. Additionally, using an OTel agent would be more acceptable and allow for easier adoption of Datadog across the hundreds of teams here.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for four months.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Lead Blockchain and Back-End Developer at Torum Technology
Real User
Good real-time user management and session analytics but needs session replays on mobile
Pros and Cons
  • "The initial setup is very straightforward."
  • "They could have better log reporting."

What is our primary use case?

We are using the solution from a monitoring and management perspective. We use it for alerts.

What is most valuable?

The solution's real-time user management and session analytics as well as the APM, are the solution's most valuable aspects.

We could easily identify the production box, and we could handle alerts.

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

It's stable. 

They have flag integrations, mail integrations, and other options as well.

What needs improvement?

We didn't do a deep analysis on this at this moment to identify the disadvantages.

We have noticed that Session Replays are unavailable on the mobile app. We'd like mobile app integrations. They could have better log reporting. That said, almost everything that we require is there. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We've only used the solution for two months. We just wanted to understand the complexities and the benefits that we might get from this product.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable and reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It may be scalable. However, we haven't actually tested anything. 

We have six or seven people on the solution at any given time. They're there to handle fixes or do an analysis of logs or monitor the infrastructure.

I'm not sure if we plan to increase usage. We are not growing very rapidly. We're just preparing our environment for the upcoming year. 

How are customer service and support?

We've dealt with support. They are helpful and responsive. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We have used AWS CloudWatch and AWS inbuilt application of the features, however, we thought that it will be good to have a separate application to do all these kinds of monitoring and to have something for handling alerting mechanisms.

We are looking for the best available platforms on the market, which also would give us better flexibility while having everything come from one place. We found that Datadog is good enough for now, and we are still exploring what it can do and our options. We are not completely in with Datadog. We've been exploring it only for four or five months.

How was the initial setup?

It's an easy product to set up. The integration was very smooth and they have multiple options. It was pretty good integration-wise.

The setup itself only took a day or two. It doesn't take long. 

What about the implementation team?

We handled the setup ourselves in-house. We did not need any outside assistance. 

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

For some features, it was quite expensive. For example, APM and RAM, and Session Replays. We are using it in a very limited way and are not using it for every microservice. We are using it for a minimal budget. As we are at an exploratory phase and are doing pay-as-you-go. Once we feel confident, we will likely get a yearly license. 

What other advice do I have?

We are customers.

We're working on the latest version. I couldn't recall the version number.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten. I need to evaluate the solution further. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud

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

Other
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer1915611 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Solutions Architect at a security firm with 51-200 employees
Vendor
Provides great visibility, has good replay functionality, and helps with monitoring
Pros and Cons
  • "The dashboards and the performance of the software have been great."
  • "It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."

What is our primary use case?

One of the things we use it for is the same thing that we use FullStory for, which is to replay customer interactions with our platform. However, it also does the monitoring. It's like monitoring cloud tools. We're really mostly monitoring our own software to make sure that everything is functioning properly. We can check a bunch of things, and we can even play back customer sessions. It’s basically monitoring our application.

How has it helped my organization?

It really provides a lot of visibility in terms of how our software is working. If there are any problems, it surfaces them right away. We get alerts in Slack. It's really an essential tool for a company that provides software as a service.

What is most valuable?

I really like the replay, the ability to replay sessions, as I'm in sales engineering, so I sometimes need to know what my prospects are doing during a proof of value. I can actually see all the mouse moving and clicking on buttons and stuff like that. I can actually tell what they've been doing. There’s a lot of the other monitoring stuff as well. The development team uses it for monitoring and finds it very helpful.

It’s been kind of in the middle of many different things. The dashboards and the performance of the software have been great.

What needs improvement?

I haven't really noticed anything that they could improve upon. Maybe they could add in some features to go both ways, to maybe make some configuration changes, etc. That's a little bit outside of what Datadog does, though. It's really very full-featured, so I don't really have any complaints.

I haven't really fully looked at the documentation as I know where I need to go and look at things. It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience. There are so many functions there that sometimes navigating your way around is a little bit hard. They have a really nice menu system. However, there's so much there. It's possible that I skipped a guided tour when I started.

It’s not intuitive to everyone. There are a lot of technical features.

For how long have I used the solution?

I’ve been using the solution for the last five months. However, the company may have used it for a year and a half.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution has been stable and reliable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We haven’t had a problem with scalability. It’s been good.

We have 25 to 30 users on it currently. Our entire organization is under 60 people. Although not everyone is on it, a lot of our staff are. The sales, engineering, and customer success teams are all on it.

We may increase usage. No doubt that will come naturally with time. We’re hiring more people, and likely new hires will use it.

How are customer service and support?

I have not had occasion yet to reach out to support.

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

We’ve also been using FullStory.

How was the initial setup?

I wasn’t part of the implementation. The one thing I will say is that when they added the functionality to review sessions, it made our use of another product, FullStory, almost obsolete. I'll have to see if we will continue using FullStory or if we can rely completely on Datadog.

What other advice do I have?

I am a customer and end-user.

We’re on the most recent version and keep it updated.

I’d rate it nine out of ten. The user experience could be slightly better.

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
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.