Datadog Reviews

Our primary use of Datadog includes: 

• Keeping a close look into our AWS resources. Monitoring our multiple RDS and ElastiCache instances play a big role in our indicators.
• Kubernetes. We aren't using all of the available Kubernetes integrations but the few of them that work out of the box adds great value to our metrics.
• Monitoring and alerting. We wired our most relevant monitoring and alerts to services like PagerDuty, and for the rest of them, we keep our engineers up to date with constant Slack updates. 
  

Observability is something that a lot of Companies are trying to achieve. Having a clear view, not only of our infrastructure but our apps and services as well, has brought a great added value to our customers.

For a logging solution, we use to have Papertrail. It did the trick but having a single point that manages and indexes all the logs is a BIG improvement. Also, having the option to generate metrics from logs is a game-changer that we're trying to include in our monitoring strategy.

I would like to say the same about APM but the support for PHP seems to be somewhat lacking. It works but I think this service could provide us more information.

With respect to logs, we used to integrate various kinds of tools to achieve very basic tasks and it always felt like a very fragile solution. I think logs are by far the most useful feature and at the same time, the one that we could improve.

APM - This is either a hit or miss, allow me to explain: we use various programming languages, mainly PHP and Ruby, and the traces generated don't always provide all of the information we want. For example, we get a great level of detail for the SQL queries that the app generates but not so much for the PHP side. It's hard to track where exactly where all of the bottlenecks are, so some analysis tools for APM could make a good addition.

Please add PHP profiling; you already have it for other popular programming languages such as Python and Java, which is great because we have a little bit of those, but our main app is powered by PHP and we don't have profiling for this yet. I guess it's only a matter of time for this to be added, so in the meanwhile, you can consider this review as a vote for the PHP profiling support.

The pricing model could be simplified as it feels a bit outdated, especially when you look at the billing model of compute instances vs the containers instances.

We have been using Datadog for one year.

It's pretty stable for the main integrations. There was only one time where Datadog was down and that was scary since all of our monitoring is handled by Datadog. There was a lot of uncertainty while the outage was in place.

For everyday use, it's adequate, but for very specific tasks, not so much. There was a time where I had to do a big export and as expected, the API is somewhat limited. Since it was a one-time task, it was not a big deal but if this was a regular task, I wouldn't be happy about it.

For small tasks, I think it's great. For specialized support, it feels like you're under-staffed, having to wait days/weeks for a solution is a big NO-NO.

I've used a few other products such as NewRelic and AppDynamics. The switch is usually affected by two factors: pricing and convenience.

Getting APM metrics out of Kubernetes is always a painful task. We got support to take a look at this and we had to go through various iterations to get it right, and then AGAIN the next year. This was a bad experience.

It was all implemented in-house. The documentation is fairly up to date, for the most part.

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.

Unfortunately, it wasn't my call to include Datadog for this Company but sure I'm glad that the Lead Architect took this decision. It brought many improvements in a small span of time.

Please add PHP profiling soon!

Log aggregation for us was a key component since we have a fairly old-school app running on VMs on bare metal. We previously didn't have much insight into our logs unless we manually tunneled them into each server.

The solution is reducing manual labor in troubleshooting problems in our environments server by server.

We also needed to monitor our Java app and MySQL database to understand their problems so that we could take action and resolve them.

Our use cases have since expanded to encompass all aspects of monitoring.

Before Datadog, all we had to go on was the gut reaction of the old guard on our team. While useful, the reactions and inherent knowledge only benefited a few folks.

Datadog has allowed us to create comprehensive dashboards and proactively send out alerts. We used the knowledge of people very versed with our products to help set up the platform and have since benefited from that.

The operative word here is visibility, and we've seen a huge improvement in that.

Seeing log trends and patterns and aggregate search was a huge first step for us. We then began using other features of the Datadog platform by enabling APM. After that, we did other integrations.

For us to have visibility into our app stack and the hardware we run has been highly beneficial.

We leverage APM, log management, and at least ten other integrations. Our DB, web servers, network, storage, and other areas are now monitored and hooked up to dashboards.

Dashboarding has also proven useful when information is going to be viewed by anyone in the organization.

Our experience has been overwhelmingly positive so far. That said, there is one area that could benefit from some polish. For example, I want to applaud the efforts in making the UI extremely usable and approachable. My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus.

I've used the solution for around six or eight months. We've had the Datadog agents deployed on our various environments.

So far, we have not had any issues with stability. It should be very stable and easy to update.

The solution is currently deployed on a limited scale. That said, we see the potential and benefits of deploying this in a cloud scenario.

Customer service and the support teams have been very responsive when we need them. They are very professional.

Positive

This was our first solution in this space.

The initial setup steps with the agent are only confusing when using the config files for the first time. The main file includes a lot that you can specify elsewhere and it's not readily apparent which one to use until you dig in more.

We did an in-house implementation.

Our ROI with Datadog has been very high. It's given us the ability to see how we're performing, which we didn't have before.

Ensure you have your ingestion pipelines dialed in, or you'll likely spend more than you were expecting.

We evaluated free and open-source options, however, ultimately, we decided that we didn't have the manpower as a small company to maintain them.

There is nothing that the documentation cannot help with; it's very good.

I'm not sure which version we're using, although I believe it to be the latest. 

We essentially use the solution in advance of performance testing, performance monitoring, and troubleshooting.

The solution affords us many uses when it comes to troubleshooting and application. Should we encounter issues while troubleshooting under load, we can take advantage of Datadog usage metrics to see which method or area is having difficulty, in order that we may resolve the issue. 

The solution has valuable troubleshooting and instrumentation features. 

The setup was a bit complex. 

As Datadog is a bit on the expensive side, I would recommend it for simple, uncomplicated, solutions.

I have been using Datadog for nearly four or five years. 

The solution is sufficiently stable. 

As our company does not have many users who are making use of the solution at present, I have not encountered issues with its scalability. 

I do not have plans to increase the usage at the moment. 

I cannot comment on tech support, as I have not made use of them, although my team members have. It seems okay. 

We mainly work with Datadog, although with Dynatrace, as well. 

The initial setup was a bit complex. 

We hired a separate team to handle the implementation. 

At present, not much staff is needed for the deployment and maintenance. 

I am not in much of a position to address the question of return on investment, although I believe it is for the better that my organization employs the solution.

I do not have knowledge of the licensing costs. 

As Datadog is a bit on the expensive side, I would recommend it for simple, uncomplicated, solutions. 

We are just the users of the solution. There are not many of us in our company. 

The solution is good for complex integations which have lots of downstream and involve multiple combined systems. This is where it is useful. 

I rate Datadog as a nine out of ten. 

I am using Datadog for error reporting.

I have found error reporting and log centralization the most valuable features. Overall, Datadog provides a full package solution.

I have been using this solution for approximately three years.

The solution is stable.

I used to process a million requests easily with Datadog, I never had any scalability issue.

I have not needed to contact support.

The initial setup is easy.

Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs.

I rate Datadog a nine out of ten.

We primarily use DataDog for performance and log monitoring of cloud environments, which include VMs and Azure Services like Azure compute, storage, network, firewall, and app services via event hubs.  

Alerting based on monitors via teams and PagerDuty. 

Logs collection for Azure services like Azure database, Azure Application Gateway, Azure AKS, and other Azure services.

Custom metrics using a Python script to collect metrics for components not natively supported by Datadog.

Synthetic testing to ensure uptime and browser tests via CI/CD pipeline.

Datadog has improved our visibility into infrastructure topology and performance. It provided a simplified view and ability to drill down to system performance, process usage, and logs.

We were able to set up monitors for infrastructure and applications, as the metrics were readily available in the platform. Fine-tuning monitors is very easy and the ability to configure monitor alerts with details on how to resolve the alert is a key value add. 

Integration with PagerDuty, teams ensure timely alerting. PagerDuty integration bring tags from Datadog to PagerDuty, which is very useful in routing incidents to the right service

The Host Map, Live Process provides performance metrics of our application. The support team likes using Datadog for identifying resources affected and obtaining the logs. 

Monitors are easy and quick to setup. Metrics are easily accessible and quick to use. The ability to send notifications based on metadata from the monitor is helpful. The setup for monitors is one time and it works for all workloads, whether it is Azure or any other cloud.

Logs rehydration helps us archive and rehydrate logs as we need. We don't need logs to be indexed at all times. Logs are required only for escalations and rehydrating does the job and provides cost savings.

We need the ability to create a service dependency map like Splunk ITSI. We have to build this in PagerDuty and it's not the best user experience. The ability to create custom inventory objects based on logs ingested would be a value add. It would be better if Datadog makes this a simple click and enable.

It would be helpful to have the ability to upgrade agents via the Datadog portal. Once agents are connected to the Datadog portal, we should be able to upgrade them quickly.

Security monitoring for Azure and Operating System (Windows and Linux) are features that need to be addressed.

Dashboards for Azure Active Directory metrics and events should be improved.

We have been using Datadog for more than six months.

Stability-wise, it has been good.

The scalability is good so far. 

Support team has been very responsive. Only complain is on issues they don't understand, they should have a quick call and unblock the customer.

We didn't have a solution in place. The only thing we had were logs.

Setup is hassle-free and pretty straightforward. 

I deployed it myself.

No returns yet. We are in growth mode. If this becomes expensive we may have to look at alternative options.

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

Datadog needs to provide better pricing for large customers.

Prior to implementing Datadog, we evaluated Splunk.

Overall, the Datadog product is really good.

It doesn't need a sales team and yet, the sales team has screwed up on some occasions. It's a great product and the customer success needs to put an extra effort to help customers with best practices rather than passing them off to support.

Customer success doesn't evangelize product features and the customer doesn't know what new is coming unless they ask about it.

The primary use case is application monitoring. We also use it set custom metrics and watch our AWS metrics, as well as data.

At my current job, I have only use it a couple months. However, I used it for a few years at a previous company.

It lets us react more quickly to things going wrong. Whereas before, it might have been 30 minutes to an hour before we noticed something going on, we will know within a minute or two if something is off, which will let us essentially get something back up and running faster for our customers, which is revenue.

Its most valuable feature is the monitoring, such as all the custom metrics that Datadog imports from AWS. In addition, the specific monitoring where you can set up an alert to a bunch of different services. 

Some of their newer solutions are interesting, like their logging, but they are not fleshed out. They could use more metrics or synthetics, which would be really helpful.

I would love to see support for front-end and mobile applications. Right now, it is mostly all back-end stuff. Being able to do some integration with our front-end products would be awesome.

It is very stable. Both times that I have worked with Datadog, we haven't had any issues with them going down. Or, if they did, we didn't know, which is good.

At the previous company that I worked at, we threw a lot at them all at once.

Because this is a newer integration, we are putting less stress on the tool. We are still working on integrating it into our platform.

It has scaled great. I haven't run into any problems anywhere that I've used it. They have handled everything that we have needed them to.

We are a 100 person company with 20 engineers.

The technical support is great. They respond quickly. They know what they are talking about and dig right in. If they don't know the answer, they can get it to us very quickly.

The integration and configuration through AWS was pretty smooth. It was easy to set up and start using. The documentation was clear. So, it worked really well.

We did the integration and configuration through AWS ourselves.

We haven't seen ROI at my current company. The solution is too new. 

At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back.

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. So, if they would scale the pricing appropriately as they add more stuff to it, that would makes sense. The pricing should reflect the abilities of the features.

We looked into self-hosting something, like Prometheus. We also evaluated New Relic.

We chose Datadog for its ease of use in getting set up and what they offered us.

Take the time to explore it and see all the metrics which are available. The metrics make the reporting better. Spend the time and learn the metrics. The things that they can send and give you are good. Learn how to aggregate them and how to write more complex queries, which they do a good job of showing how to do, but I found that newer people don't do this. They just try to use the baseline set of features. Doing the more complex stuff adds significant value.

We have PagerDuty integrated with it, as well as all of AWS. Those are the big ones we have running through it. It integrates well. It essentially replaces CloudWatch, so we can just use Datadog, which is nice. The biggest thing that they provide is putting everything in one spot.

I have just used the AWS version.

We can build dashboards as fast we roll out new systems, which can be fast.

We use standard and custom metrics for every new system we roll out for 360 degree visibility into our systems.

The most valuable features have been: Sharable dashboards, TimeBoards, dogstatsd API, Slack Integration, Event logging API. CloudTrail Events, Tags, alerts, and anomaly detection. EBS Volume Snapshot Age, which they added upon request. We used PagerDuty integration for a while as well.

More granular control over dashboard sharing. Timeboard sharing.

There are infrequent hiccups, which have been decreasing over the time we have used it.

No.

Customer Service:

Never seen better. Questions answered usually almost immediately, even on weekends. An in-stream with your event stream.

Technical Support:

High.

Overall they have always had an amazing team, and quality has been maintained as the company has grown.

Complementary to other tools we used.

Setup is generally easy. They provide an large number of integrations, some are more complex than others, which is to be expected.

In house implementation.

We didn’t calculate explicitly, but as we used the product to track down underutilized instances, it more than paid for itself in the first month.

Pricing overall in this segment has standardized in the last several years.

A few, including Zabbix and Icinga.

One of the fastest and most flexible tools we have used in this area..

I am using the solution for monitoring metrics, logs, traces, etc. It's mainly for making dashboards as well as monitoring our services. 

We also use Datadog to help centralize our incident management to show the logs, where issues spiked, and some metrics. 

We use Datadog to do troubleshooting in Kubernetes, specifically in our Azure Kubernetes service. Beyond that, we are looking to use open telemetry in tandem with Datadog to further our log-tracing efforts. In the future, this may be expanded.

This solution improves our organization as now we have higher visibility into our application that we otherwise would not have. 

Since the Datadog agent comes in three forms, agentless, scraping, and through the API, it is very flexible. It is this flexibility in how to report our logs that keeps our logs centralized and organized. 

One major drawback of Datadog is the cost. Sometimes we set up flows in place to monitor resources that end up logging more than we thought, and the bill is too high.

Dashboards have been marrying the most valuable parts of Datadog. Dashboards use metrics that are very helpful for monitoring services. I recently used metrics to monitor the number of pods in Kubernetes, the spikes in requests in Kubernetes, and overall CPU and memory usage in our Kubernetes clusters. 

We can also use log analytics to further our understanding. We can handle debugging and find out why things are breaking in our applications. 

The log portion of Datadog has robust features to debug the applications we are running. I really appreciate the ability to use facets to par down the logs.

The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users. The documentation is way too much text and has no real information just to help get people started. Sometimes it doesn't help to read an entire essay just to get a grasp on how the logs or metrics work.

I've used the solution for two years.