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reviewer2044986 - PeerSpot reviewer
Atlassian Expert at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Great observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities
Pros and Cons
  • "It brings in observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities - all of which we need to operate at scale."
  • "The current way accounts are billed could be vastly improved - especially when involving multiple organizations across multiple accounts in combination with reserved commitments."

What is our primary use case?

We are providing managed services to our customers across multiple industries. Datadog is key to delivering these services by bringing the observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities we need to operate at scale. 

We operate custom cloud native workloads as well as ISV products such as Atlassian Jira or Confluence. 

Integrating Synthetics, infrastructure, and application performance monitoring, as well as piping all logs through Datadog allows us to operate more with less with good alerting right in time.

How has it helped my organization?

We are providing managed services to our customers across multiple industries. 

Datadog is key to delivering these services. It brings in observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities - all of which we need to operate at scale. 

We operate custom cloud native workloads as well as ISV products such as Atlassian Jira or Confluence. 

Integrating Synthetics, infrastructure, and application performance monitoring, as well as piping all logs through Datadog, help with getting alerts in real-time.

What is most valuable?

We are providing managed services to our customers across multiple industries. 

Datadog delivers observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities we need to operate at scale. 

Operating custom cloud native workloads as well as ISV products such as Atlassian Jira or Confluence is also something we do. Integrating Synthetics, infrastructure, and application performance monitoring, as well as piping all logs through Datadog allows us to operate while grabbing alerts in real-time.

What needs improvement?

The current way accounts are billed could be vastly improved - especially when involving multiple organizations across multiple accounts in combination with reserved commitments. 

Being able to have an automatic materialized report on certain dashboards that could be exported as PDF to be shared with non-Datadog users could help a lot. 

Other than that, we are more than happy with the features we use regularly.

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.
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For how long have I used the solution?

We have been using Datadog since 2015.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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reviewer1438557 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Cloud Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Real User
Straightforward to integrate and automate; excellent technical support
Pros and Cons
  • "Straightforward to integrate and automate."
  • "Could be a little more user friendly."

What is our primary use case?

I'm a senior cloud security engineer and we are customers of Datadog. 

What is most valuable?

In terms of the public cloud provider integration of AWS, I would say it's very easy and straightforward to integrate. We can automate that way as well, because it also provides the cloud formation template and is a way to have a central place to monitor and visualize metrics in a multi-account structure. It's something we really need because the company has many AWS accounts. Rather than jumping from one account to another, Datadog gives us the functionality of having everything on one platform, in one place.

What needs improvement?

I believe there is room for improvement with this solution. It wasn't easy for me to get a quick understanding of what this tool offers us as opposed to the added tools of AWS. By that, I mean in regards to finding a better way to apply some filters or to create some alarms. I don't get more advanced features in comparison to AWS but at least I get a centralized way of doing things, which can be done on the AWS side as well. It's more complicated because you have to configure some other services to stream their logs from multi accounts to one account. It could be more user friendly and include advanced examples in the documentation showing some use cases or customer case studies, so you can get a clear idea that this functionality provides something extra. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for about a month. 

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?

It's an SaaS solution, so it should be scalable although I don't know the architecture of it.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have support from a technical engineer during the POC, which is still ongoing. It's amazing. Their customization and support during the POC include weekly meetings, with a follow up of any issues through email and Slack. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup in regards to integration with AWS was very simple.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend this solution even though I don't have much experience with it yet. The company is currently using New Relic and we are now investigating Datadog for two reasons; the cost and also the integration with microservices and Kubernetes. I feel like this is a good solution. 

There is some room for improvement, so I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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
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.
DevOps Engineer at Spark New Zealand
Real User
It has enhanced the performance of my team
Pros and Cons
  • "It has enhanced the performance of my team."
  • "The product could do better with its notifications."

What is our primary use case?

We use it for notifications, alerting, and capturing most of the information from Amazon, such as EC2 instances.

How has it helped my organization?

It has enhanced the performance of my team.

What needs improvement?

The product could do better with its notifications. 

I want more technical support than conferences because technical support helps with setting up the product much easier.

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

So far, it has been pretty stable. After we stand up and configure it, it works well.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We have managed to get up to 350 hosts in one of the clusters, and it works fine.

How is customer service and technical support?

Datadog's support is pretty good.

How was the initial setup?

The integration and configuration of the product in our AWS environment was easy. This was one of the many things that I liked about Datadog.

What was our ROI?

I have not seen ROI out.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We chose Datadog over the other products that we evaluated because it had better features: notifications, alerting, and metric capture. Also, Datadog had the skill sets that we wanted at the time.

What other advice do I have?

Try out some of the other products in comparison. This is a good product if you are looking for notifications and custom metrics.

We have always used the cloud version of this product.

This product also integrates with Slack and PagerDuty.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user147213 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO & Co-Founder with 51-200 employees
Vendor
I always have Datadog up to debug issues with integrations or to ensure that live campaigns are running smoothly.

We were building a real-time bidding exchange for digital out-of-home ads by providing the analytics and the infrastructure for the ecosystem. We not only facilitate the buys, but we also act as an ad server for the network and advertisers who put in their server requirements. It is very similar to the large online ad servers. In order to provide this real-time service, we had to be able to monitor and analyze a wide range of data points for the many media companies in their ad exchange. 

We wanted to find an “out-of-the-box” metrics solution that would integrate easily with current systems. We found that Datadog included the integrations that we needed to get our monitoring solution up quickly. Additionally, we liked Datadog’s ability to perform customized metric monitoring, log critical events, and scale easily. I had scaled up open-source monitoring solutions once before, and it wasn’t fun. So when I had the opportunity to do it again, I said ‘No.’ 

On a daily basis, Datadog eliminates a lot of the back and forth with the media owners to find out what is going on, it is just a good visual tool for seeing the activity from each of the content management systems that we work with. It is an easy way to go in and get a feel of what is going on. Without Datadog, we would have to repeatedly spend time to reach out to each media owner directly to see if they are sending any requests that day.

As we moved toward a real-time system, it was important to understand whether our partner networks had reported all of their ads in a short period of time. We now use Datadog as a daily monitoring tool to get a feel for what networks are actively sending requests to their servers, what live campaigns are running smoothly and whether the right networks are requesting ads. I always have Datadog up on a daily basis to debug issues with integrations or just to make sure that live campaigns are running smoothly. 

Each network that we work with has different requirements. In terms of connectivity of their networks, we are always dealing with different frequencies and rates of requests each day. The wide diversity in partners has made customization key since the monitoring needs for each partner varies drastically. There are days where we see weird trends of requests coming in. We are able to use Datadog’s custom graphs to catch the anomalies or concern areas in their system on a real-time basis.

Going forward, we are looking to create separate dashboards for each ad network that we work with. This will enable us to gain more detailed metrics for each individual media owner. We will be able to take these detailed metrics and use them to quickly identify potential problem areas, improving our ability to solve problems as soon as they are detected.

Disclosure: PeerSpot has made contact with the reviewer to validate that the person is a real user. The information in the posting is based upon a vendor-supplied case study, but the reviewer has confirmed the content's accuracy.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2045043 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees
Real User
Great monitors and APM with helpful Terraform support
Pros and Cons
  • "APM is great and has provided low-effort out-of-the-box observability for various services."
  • "Delta traces on the Golang profiler are extremely expensive concerning memory utilization."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the product for tracing, metrics, and alarms in various deployment environments.

How has it helped my organization?

The product has provided our company with improved observability, which has helped make the incident response more targeted and quicker.

What is most valuable?

APM is great and has provided low-effort out-of-the-box observability for various services. 

Monitors are helpful, and definitions are simple. 

Terraform support is nice as it allows us to create homogenous monitoring environments in various deployment environments with little additional effort. It also facilitates version control of monitor definitions, etc. 

The Golang profiler is generally good with the exception of delta profiles; it has provided helpful observability into Heap Allocations which has helped us reduce GC overhead.

What needs improvement?

Delta traces on the Golang profiler are extremely expensive concerning memory utilization. In a Kubernetes environment where we would like to set per-pod memory allocations as low as possible, the overhead of that profiler feature is prohibitive. In one case, our pods (which were provisioned to target 250 MB and max at 500 MB memory) got stuck in a crash loop due to out-of-memory, which was caused entirely by the delta profiles feature of the profiler.

Multistep Datadog synthetics lack the feature of basic arithmetic. For our use case, performing basic arithmetic on the output of previous steps to produce input for subsequent steps would be extremely useful.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for nine months.

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?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2045022 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Great UI and documentation but needs to offer K8s deployment monitoring in real-time
Pros and Cons
  • "The installation step is pretty straightforward."
  • "I'm not sure if Datadog can monitor K8s deployments in real-time. For instance, being able to see a deployment step by step visually. This would be helpful if there were any incidents during the deployment."

What is our primary use case?

We use Datadog to monitor our Kubernetes clusters. 

We have 3 different clusters for different parts of the SDLC. We run the Datadog agent DaemonSet as well as the Datadog cluster agent. Our services have the APM installed by default. 

To create monitors, we use Terraform. This is provided out-of-the-box for our service owner. 

We run EKS on top of K8s, therefore, we also make use of some of the AWS monitoring capabilities that can be integrated into Datadog. 

We are hugely reliant on Datadog for all aspects of our system.

How has it helped my organization?

With Datadog, we were able to gain observability in our system. 

The installation step is pretty straightforward. 

It's easy to use by non-DevOps users. For instance, our engineers do not interact with K8s often; therefore, it is hard for them to debug. However, with Datadog, they are able to view their containers and deployments with a single click. 

We also heavily use the tags to help us identify who the service owners are. This is super useful when we need to track owners for patching or pick up new features we implemented.

What is most valuable?

The APM and K8s monitoring are the most valuable aspects of the solution. The K8s monitoring allows all customers to view their infra, even if they do not use K8s daily. They can just click on a few tabs to get all of the information they need. 

It is also very easy to install on our system. APM has helped debug applications on our system as well. We were able to view why a service has suddenly shut down.

We also use Datadog for SLOs/SLAs as well. We check the live endpoint of services to ensure they are still up and running.

What needs improvement?

There is not much that needs to be improved. 

The UI is super user-friendly. The deployment process is easy. We enjoy using the integrations with Slack and PagerDuty. 

Customer support is awesome from our experience. There is a lot of documentation for us to be able to use if we need to. 

I'm not sure if Datadog can monitor K8s deployments in real-time. For instance, being able to see a deployment step by step visually. This would be helpful if there were any incidents during the deployment. 

In general, Datadog is a great solution.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used Datadog since I joined my company about a year ago.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We haven't had issues with the stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is really great.

How are customer service and support?

We've had no issues with the product or support. 

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is super simple, and the documentation was helpful.

What about the implementation team?

We managed the initial setup process in-house.

What was our ROI?

We've witnessed ROI in our DevOps.

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?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Security Analyst at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Integrates well with different providers and easy to install, but needs better reporting
Pros and Cons
  • "Its integration is most valuable because you can integrate it with various service providers such as AWS, .Net, etc."
  • "I'm still exploring the trial version, and it is fine. One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report. This is something that could be improved. I probably need to navigate to a place to access the reports."

What is our primary use case?

We are currently testing it. If the testing goes well, we'll purchase the full version, and it will probably be our main monitoring tool. We plan to use it for monitoring our activities and the attacks on our systems or network.

How has it helped my organization?

It is a cloud monitoring tool. I believe it would make things easier for our clients in terms of monitoring.

What is most valuable?

Its integration is most valuable because you can integrate it with various service providers such as AWS, .Net, etc.

What needs improvement?

I'm still exploring the trial version, and it is fine. One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report. This is something that could be improved. I probably need to navigate to a place to access the reports. 

For how long have I used the solution?

We started using its trial version just last week.

How are customer service and technical support?

We have not yet interacted with their technical support.

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

Currently, we're on EventTracker. We are doing research to see if we could get a better monitoring solution. That's why we are trying out Datadog. If we like it, we will buy the full version. We would also recommend it to our other clients.

How was the initial setup?

It is easy to install, and it doesn't have any cumbersome procedures. Its deployment took a couple of hours.

What about the implementation team?

I did it by myself.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated solutions from SolarWinds and IBM.

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend this solution. I am still trying it out, and I haven't encountered any challenges so far. I would rate Datadog a seven out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Tech Lead & Solutions Architect at DXC
Real User
Customizable, attractive panel design, and gives broad insight
Pros and Cons
  • "I have found some of the most valuable features to be the way things all come together that gives us a point of view that is useful. The panel is very beautiful and customizable."
  • "The installation is easy for me. However, if you are new to this solution it might not be so easy."

What is our primary use case?

I implement this solution for clients.

What is most valuable?

I have found some of the most valuable features to be the way things all come together that gives us a point of view that is useful. The panel is very beautiful and customizable. The configuration file was really helpful, we were able to configure the solution in the way we needed. The portability of this solution is more flexible than other competitors, allowing us to change cloud services when we want. We are not locked into a particular one.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is scalable.

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

We have used CloudWatch previously and this solution is better at meeting all our needs.

How was the initial setup?

The installation is easy for me. However, if you are new to this solution it might not be so easy.

What about the implementation team?

I am an implementor, I did the implantation of the solution.

What other advice do I have?

I rate Datadog a nine out of ten.

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.