What is our primary use case?
The solution is basically used for servers and applications.
What is most valuable?
The UI, basically, is the most valuable aspect of the solution. I really like the look and feel of the solution. It's not very distinctive now since other players have caught up, however, they were the first in the market to present such an effective UI.
The many dozens of integrations that the solution brings out of the box are excellent.
It's easy to set up.
What needs improvement?
Deploying the agents is still very manual.
Network monitoring could be better or rolled into this solution so that you do not have to buy a different product.
Customization of the tool itself should be taken into account. At the moment, although what they provide out of the box is good, they don't offer many customization possibilities. I know it's difficult, however, it's something that they would need to look at. When the customer gets some customization, they want customized requirements. We cannot do it.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been dealing with the solution for five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's quite stable. I have never had an issue in regard to reliability, so it's very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's very scalable. I have not reached the limits at any time, never in the solution. I've never seen any performance degradation in large environments. I would say it's very scalable.
Each client has its own instance. We do not share instances with multiple customers. There's usually between 20 and 30, depending on the customer.
How are customer service and support?
I never use technical support, to be honest.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup for the solution itself is quite straightforward. You just set it up and that's it. However, when it comes to, for instance, deploying the agents to the servers, or at least the target machines, it's still a manual task. They still do not have centralized management of the FD agents, which basically delays the deployment of the solution. It's very manual still.
How long it takes to deploy is difficult to pin down. It will vary based on the environment size. Obviously, if it's ten servers, it will basically take half an hour or one hour. If it's 5,000, obviously, besides the number of notes, other considerations will need to be taken into account. If t's a large environment, it will take much longer. We would need to basically develop a solution, or an effective process to deploy the agent and configure them in a standardized manner. This is something that the tool itself or the tool provider does not offer out of the box. You need to build it. That's a drawback.
How many people you need for the deployment and maintenance processes depends on the environment's size and geographical area. On average, I would usually require for every 500 notes, one resource for implementation. Then for overall support, I usually put one resource per 1500.
What was our ROI?
Before, the ROI was much higher as you would not have to compete with any kind of tool since they were very good in the space. However, with time, other companies have picked up the slack. Now, you have other tools which provide a higher ROI. I cannot give a specific ROI percentage since I don't use it for personal use with deployment. We deploy it on behalf of customers. Obviously, depending on the deal, depending on the size, and the ROI will vary. If people are looking for a global monitoring solution in the same tool as Datadog network monitoring, they are always hindered as Datadog does not provide an adequate solution for it. That kind of decreases the ROI since you still need to get another tool to do the network monitoring.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing is a bit complicated. When you pay for it on a note basis, that's perfectly fine. However, when you put log analytics on top of it, it's based on traffic. This is actually an issue. It gets complicated.
What other advice do I have?
I'm providing Datadog. I'm a retailer.
I would recommend the solution.
I would suggest if their environment is in the cloud, companies have their environments in the public cloud, such as GCP, Azure, or AWS. Datadog is a very good candidate to provide an overview of the monitoring. If you want to consider a hybrid solution where systems and servers and applications also provide a good solution and have a lot of APM capabilities, the only drawback will be network monitoring. When you grab a tool that you want to basically monitor the entire environment at a single point of contact, with Datadog, it's possible, however, there's not an effective tool to do network monitoring.
I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: