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Principal Enterprise Systems Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
An out-of-the-box solution that allows you to quickly build dashboards
Pros and Cons
  • "I like that you can build out a dashboard pretty quickly. There are some things that come out of the box that you don't really need to do, which is great because they're default settings."
  • "I think better access to their engineers when we have a problem could be better."

What is our primary use case?

We deploy agents on-premise to collect data on on-premise VM instances. We don't use Datadog in our cloud network. We do have some Cloud apps that we have it on and we also have Containers. We have it on their headquarters, the main software for them is on their own Cloud.

Eventually, we're building out the process now and using it better. We plan to use Datadog for root cause analysis relating to any kinds of issues we have with software, with applications going down, latency issues, connection issues, etc. Eventually, we're going to use Datadog for application performance, monitoring, and management. To be proactive around thresholds, alerts, bottlenecks, etc. 

Our developers and QA teams use this solution. They use it to analyze network traffic, load, CPU load, CPU usage, and then Tracey NPM, API calls for their application. There are roughly 100 users right now. Maybe there's 200 total, but on a given day, maybe 13 people using this solution.

How has it helped my organization?

It hasn't improved the way our organization functions yet, because there's a lot of red tape to cut through with cultural challenges and changes. I don't think it's changed the way we do things yet, but I think it will — absolutely it will. It's just going to take some time.

What is most valuable?

I like that you can build out a dashboard pretty quickly. There are some things that come out of the box that you don't really need to do, which is great because they're default settings. Once you install the agent on the machine, they pick up a lot of metrics for you that are going to be 70 or more percent of what you need. Out of the box, it's pretty good.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Datadog every day since September 2020. I also used it at a previous company that I worked for.

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Datadog
November 2024
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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability-wise, it's great.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It seems like it'll scale well. We're automating it with Ansible scripts and service now so that when we build a new virtual machine it will automatically install Datadog on that box.

How are customer service and support?

The tool itself is pretty good and the customer service is good, but I think they're a growing company. I think better access to their engineers when we have a problem could be better. For example, if I asked the question, "Hey, how do I install it on this type of component?" We'll try to get an engineer on the phone with us to step us through everything, but that's a challenge because they're so busy.

Technically-wise, everything's fine. We don't need any support, everything that I need to do, I can do right out of the box. But as far as, in the knowledge of their engineers on how to configure it on given systems that we have, that's maybe at six because they're just not as available as I would've hoped.

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

We were using AppDynamics. Technically, we still have it in-house because it's tightly wound into certain systems, but we'll probably pull that off slowly over time. The reason we added Datadog and eventually we'll fully switch over is due to cost. It's more cost-friendly to do it with Datadog.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, we looked at Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic. Personally, I wouldn't have chosen Datadog for the POC if it were up to me. Datadog was a leader, but New Relic was looking really good. In the end, the people above me decided to go with Datadog — it's a big company, so they wanted to move fast, which makes sense.

What other advice do I have?

If you're interested in using Datadog, just do your homework, as we did. We're happy so far I think; time will tell as we are still rolling things out. It's a very good company. It's going to be a year before we really can tell anything. If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good.

There are some strengths that AppDynamics and Dynatrace have that Datadog I don't think will have down the road, but they're not things we necessarily need — they're outliers. It would be nice to have them, but we can manage without them.

Know what you want. There is no need to pay for solutions like Dynatrace or AppDynamics that are more expensive or things that are just nice to have if you don't absolutely need to have them. That's something people need to understand. You just have to make sure you understand what it is that you need out of the tool — they are all a little different, those three. I would say to anybody that's going with Datadog: you just have to be patient at the beginning. It's a very busy company right now. They're very hot in the market.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Datadog a rating of eight. It does what we need it to do, and it seems to be pretty user-friendly in terms of setting things up.

Features-wise, I'd give them a rating of ten out of ten. The better access we get to assistance from the engineers on how to configure dashboards and pulling metrics that we need, that would bring it up a little bit. So overall it would be harder and it would have to be perfect for it. I would say maybe they could bring it to a nine.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Victor Chen1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Zip
User
Good for log ingestion and analyzing logs with easy searchability of data
Pros and Cons
  • "The feature I've found most valuable is the log search feature."
  • "More helpful log search keywords/tips would be helpful in improving Datadog's log dashboard."

What is our primary use case?

We use Datadog as our main log ingestion source, and Datadog is one of the first places we go to for analyzing logs. 

This is especially true for cases of debugging, monitoring, and alerting on errors and incidents, as we use traffic logs from K8s, Amazon Web Services, and many other services at our company to Datadog. In addition, many products and teams at our company have dashboards for monitoring statistics (sometimes based on these logs directly, other times we set queries for these metrics) to alert us if there are any errors or health issues.

How has it helped my organization?

Overall, at my company, Datadog has made it easy to search for and look up logs at an impressively quick search rate over a large amount of logs. 

It seamlessly allows you to set up monitoring and alerting directly from log queries which is convenient and helps for a good user experience, and while there is a bit of a learning curve, given enough time a majority of my company now uses Datadog as the first place to check when there are errors or bugs. 

However, the cost aspect of Datadog is tricky to gauge because it's related to usage, and thus, it is hard to tell the relative value of Datadog year to year.

What is most valuable?

The feature I've found most valuable is the log search feature. It's set up with our ingestion to be a quick one-stop shop, is reliable and quick, and seamlessly integrates into building custom monitors and alerts based on log volume and timeframes. 

As a result, it's easy to leverage this to triage bugs and errors, since we can pinpoint the logs around the time that they occur and get metadata/context around the issue. This is the main feature that I use the most in my workflow with Datadog to help debug and triage issues.

What needs improvement?

More helpful log search keywords/tips would be helpful in improving Datadog's log dashboard. I recently struggled a lot to parse text from raw line logs that didn't seem to match directly with facets. There should be smart searching capabilities. However, it's not intuitive to learn how to leverage them, and instead had to resort to a Python script to do some simple regex parsing (I was trying to parse "file:folder/*/*" from the logs and yet didn't seem to be able to do this in Datadog, maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the logs but didn't seem to easily find resources on how to do this either). 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for 10 months.

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

Beware that the cost will fluctuate (and it often only gets more expensive very quickly).

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Buyer's Guide
Datadog
November 2024
Learn what your peers think about Datadog. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: November 2024.
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Head of Software at Emporia
User
Top 10
Great for web application log aggregation, performance tracing, and alerting
Pros and Cons
  • "Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most."
  • "I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case is for custom and vendor-supplied web application log aggregation, performance tracing, and alerting. 

We run a mix of AWS EC2, Azure serverless, and colocated VMWare servers to support higher education web applications. We're managing a hybrid multi-cloud solution across hundreds of applications is always a challenge. 

Datadog agents are on each web host, and we have native integrations with GitHubAWS, and Azure to get all of our instrumentation and error data in one place for easy analysis and monitoring.

How has it helped my organization?

Through use of Datadog across all of our apps, we were able to consolidate a number of alerting and error-tracking apps. Datadog ties them all together in cohesive dashboards. Whether the app is vendor supplied or we built it ourselves, the depth of tracing, profiling, and hooking into logs is all obtainable and tunable. Both legacy .NET Framework and Windows Event Viewer and cutting edge .NET Core with streaming logs all work. The breath of coverage for any app type or situation is really incredible. It feels like there's nothing we can't monitor.

What is most valuable?

When it comes to Datadog, several features have proven particularly valuable. 

The centralized pipeline tracking and error logging provide a comprehensive view of our development and deployment processes, making it much easier to identify and resolve issues quickly. 

Synthetic testing has been a game-changer, allowing us to catch potential problems before they impact real users. 

Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most. And the ability to create custom dashboards has been incredibly useful, allowing us to visualize key metrics and KPIs in a way that makes sense for different teams and stakeholders. 

Together, these features form a powerful toolkit that helps us maintain high performance and reliability across our applications and infrastructure, ultimately leading to better user satisfaction and more efficient operations.

What needs improvement?

I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view. 

I like the idea of monitoring on the go, yet it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box. 

While the documentation is very good considering all the frameworks and technology Datadog covers, there are areas - specifically .NET Profiling and Tracing of IIS hosted apps - that need a lot of focus to pick up on the key details needed. 

In some cases the screenshots don't match the text as updates are made.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for about three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have been impressed with the uptime. It offers clean and light resource usage of the agents.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution scales well and is customizable. 

How are customer service and support?

Customer support is always helpful to help us tune our committed costs and alerting us when we start spending out of the on demand budget.

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

We used a mix of a custom error email system, SolarWinds, UptimeRobot, and GitHub actions. We switched to find one platform that could give deep app visibility regardless of whether it is Linux or Windows or Container, cloud or on-prem hosted.

How was the initial setup?

The implementation is generally simple. .NET Profiling of IIS and aligning logs to traces and profiles was a challenge.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented the setup in-house. 

What was our ROI?

We've witnessed significant time saved by the development team assessing bugs and performance issues.

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

Set up live trials to asses cost scaling. Small decisions around how monitors are used can have big impacts on cost scaling. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

NewRelic was considered. LogicMonitor was chosen over Datadog for our network and campus server management use cases.

What other advice do I have?

We're excited to dig further into the new offerings around LLM and continue to grow our footprint in Datadog. 

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?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Head of Software at Emporia
User
Top 10
Good centralized pipeline tracking and error logging with very good performance
Pros and Cons
  • "Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most."
  • "In some cases the screenshots don't match the text as updates are made."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case is custom and vendor-supplied web application log aggregation, performance tracing and alerting. 

We run a mix of AWS EC2, Azure serverless, and colocated VMWare servers to support higher education web applications. 

Managing a hybrid multi-cloud solution across hundreds of applications is always a challenge. 

Datadog agents on each web host and native integrations with GitHubAWS, and Azure get all of our instrumentation and error data in one place for easy analysis and monitoring.

How has it helped my organization?

Using Datadog across all of our apps, we were able to consolidate a number of alerting and error-tracking apps, and Datadog ties them all together in cohesive dashboards. 

Whether the app is vendor-supplied or we built it ourselves, the depth of tracing, profiling, and hooking into logs is all obtainable and tunable. Both legacy .NET Framework and Windows Event Viewer and cutting-edge .NET Core with streaming logs all work. 

The breadth of coverage for any app type or situation is really incredible. It feels like there's nothing we can't monitor.

What is most valuable?

When it comes to Datadog, several features have proven particularly valuable. For example, the centralized pipeline tracking and error logging provide a comprehensive view of our development and deployment processes, making it much easier to identify and resolve issues quickly. 

Synthetic testing has been a game-changer, allowing us to catch potential problems before they impact real users. 

Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most. And the ability to create custom dashboards has been incredibly useful, allowing us to visualize key metrics and KPIs in a way that makes sense for different teams and stakeholders. 

Together, these features form a powerful toolkit that helps us maintain high performance and reliability across our applications and infrastructure, ultimately leading to better user satisfaction and more efficient operations.

What needs improvement?

They need an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to provide a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view. 

I like the idea of monitoring on the go. That said, it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box. 

While the documentation is very good considering all the frameworks and technology Datadog covers, there are areas - specifically .NET Profiling and Tracing of IIS hosted apps - that need a lot of focus to pick up on the key details needed. 

In some cases the screenshots don't match the text as updates are made. I spent longer than I should figuring out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for about three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have been impressed with the uptime and clean and light resource usage of the agents.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution has been very scalable and very customizable.

How are customer service and support?

Support is always helpful to help us tune our committed costs and alert us when we start spending out of the on-demand budget.

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

We used a mix of a custom error email system, SolarWinds, UptimeRobot, and GitHub actions. We switched to find one platform that could give deep app visibility regardless of Linux or Windows or Container, cloud or on-prem hosted.

How was the initial setup?

The implementation is generally simple. That said, .NET Profiling of IIS and aligning logs to traces and profiles was a challenge.

What about the implementation team?

The solution was implemented in-house. 

What was our ROI?

Our ROI has been significant time saved by the development team assessing bugs and performance issues.

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

Set up live trials to asses cost scaling. Small decisions around how monitors are used can impact cost scaling. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

NewRelic was considered. LogicMonitor was chosen over Datadog for our network and campus server management use cases.

What other advice do I have?

We are excited to explore the new offerings around LLM further and continue to expand our presence in Datadog. 

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?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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PeerSpot user
Neil Elver - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Development Team Lead at TCS EDUCATION SYSTEM
User
Top 20
Good synthetic testing, centralized pipeline tracking and error logging
Pros and Cons
  • "Synthetic testing has been a game-changer, allowing us to catch potential problems before they impact real users."
  • "I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use case is custom and vendor-supplied web application log aggregation, performance tracing and alerting. 

We run a mix of AWS EC2, Azure serverless, and colocated VMWare servers to support higher education web applications. 

Managing a hybrid multi-cloud solution across hundreds of applications is always a challenge. Datadog agents on each web host and native integrations with GitHubAWS, and Azure get all of our instrumentation and error data in one place for easy analysis and monitoring.

How has it helped my organization?

Through the use of Datadog across all of our apps, we were able to consolidate a number of alerting and error-tracking apps, and Datadog ties them all together in cohesive dashboards. Whether the app is vendor-supplied or we built it ourselves, the depth of tracing, profiling, and hooking into logs is all obtainable and tunable. Both legacy .NET Framework and Windows Event Viewer and cutting-edge .NET Core with streaming logs all work. The breadth of coverage for any app type or situation is really incredible. It feels like there's nothing we can't monitor.

What is most valuable?

When it comes to Datadog, several features have proven particularly valuable. 

The centralized pipeline tracking and error logging provide a comprehensive view of our development and deployment processes, making it much easier to identify and resolve issues quickly. 

Synthetic testing has been a game-changer, allowing us to catch potential problems before they impact real users. Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most. And the ability to create custom dashboards has been incredibly useful, allowing us to visualize key metrics and KPIs in a way that makes sense for different teams and stakeholders. 

Together, these features form a powerful toolkit that helps us maintain high performance and reliability across our applications and infrastructure, ultimately leading to better user satisfaction and more efficient operations.

What needs improvement?

I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view. I like the idea of monitoring on the go, however, it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box. 

While the documentation is very good considering all the frameworks and technology Datadog covers, there are areas - specifically .NET Profiling and Tracing of IIS-hosted apps - that need a lot of focus to pick up on the key details needed. In some cases the screenshots don't match the text as updates are made. I feel I spent longer than I should figuring out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for about three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have been impressed with the uptime and clean and light resource usage of the agents.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution was very scalable and very customizable.

How are customer service and support?

Sales service is always helpful in tuning our committed costs and alerting us when we start spending outside the on-demand budget.

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

We used a mix of a custom error email system, SolarWinds, UptimeRobot, and GitHub actions. We switched to find one platform that could give deep app visibility regardless of Linux, Windows, Container, cloud or on-prem hosted.

How was the initial setup?

The setup is generally simple. That said, .NET Profiling of IIS and aligning logs to traces and profiles was a challenge.

What about the implementation team?

The solution was iImplemented in-house. 

What was our ROI?

I'd count our ROI as significant time saved by the development team assessing bugs and performance issues.

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

It's a good idea to set up live trials to asses cost scaling. Small decisions around how monitors are used can have big impacts on cost scaling. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

NewRelic was considered. LogicMonitor was chosen over Datadog for our network and campus server management use cases.

What other advice do I have?

We are excited to dig further into the new offerings around LLM and continue to grow our footprint in Datadog. 

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?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Tony Martinez1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at VANTA INC
Vendor
Great logging, session replays, and alerting
Pros and Cons
  • "Dashboards are helpful for reviewing occasionally to get a higher-level overview of what's happening."
  • "The UI has a lot going on. It should be simpler and have a better way to onboard someone new to using Datadog."

What is our primary use case?

Our primary use cases include:

  • Alert on errors customers encounter in our product. We've set up logs that go to slack to tell us when a certain error threshold is hit.
  • Investigate slow page load times. We have pages in our app that are loading slowly and the logs help us figure out which queries are taking the longest time.
  • Metrics. We collect metrics on product usage.
  • Session replays. We watch session replays to see what a user was doing when a page took a long time to load or hit an error. This is helpful.

How has it helped my organization?

It's helped us find bugs that customers are experiencing before they're reported to us. Sometimes, customers don't report errors, so being able to catch errors before they're reported helps us investigate before other users find errors

Datadog has helped us investigate slow page loading times and even see the specific queries that are taking a long time to load

Logging lets us see the context around an error. For example, see if a backend service had an error before it surfaced on the frontend.

Dashboards are helpful for reviewing occasionally to get a higher-level overview of what's happening.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable aspects include: 

  • Logging. Being able to view detailed logs helps debug issues.
  • Session replays. They are helpful for seeing what a customer was doing before they saw an error or had a slow page load
  • Alerting. This is an important part of our on-call process to send alerts to slack when an error threshold is crossed. Alerts/monitors are easy to configure to only alert when we want them to alert.
  • Dashboards. It's helpful to pull up dashboards that show our most common errors or page performance. It's a good way to see how the app is performing from a birds-eye-view.

What needs improvement?

The UI has a lot going on. It should be simpler and have a better way to onboard someone new to using Datadog.

The log querying syntax can be confusing. Usually, I filter by finding a facet in a log and selecting to filter by that facet - but I'm not sure how to write the filter myself

The monitor/alert syntax is also somewhat hard to understand.

Overall, it should be easier to learn how to use the product while you're using the product. Perhaps tooltips or a link to learn more about whatever section you're using.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for two years.

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

We did not previously use a different solution.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not evaluate other options. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Director of DevSecOps at CIBT
User
Consistent, centralized service for varied cloud-based applications
Pros and Cons
  • "Our primary alerts, based on metrics and synthetic transactions, are the most used and relied upon for decreased MTTA/MTTR across all of our platforms. This is followed by deep log analysis that enables us to quickly and easily get to a preliminary root cause that someone on the infrastructure, platform or development teams can take and focus their attention on the precise target that Datadog revealed as the issue to be remediated."
  • "They could enhance the alerting functions by creating a new feature to add direct SMS notifications, on-call rotation scheduling, etc., that could replace the need to have this as an external third-party solution integration."

What is our primary use case?

The current use case for Datadog in our environment is observability.  We use Datadog as the primary log ingestion and analysis point, along with consolidation of application/infrastructure metrics across cloud environments and realtime alerting to issues that arise in production.  

Datadog integrates within all aspects of our infrastructure and applications to provide valuable insights into Containers, Serverless functions, Deep Logging Analysis, Virtualized Hardware and Cost Optimizations.

How has it helped my organization?

Datadog improved our observability layer by creating a consistent, centralized service for all of our varied cloud-based applications. All of our production and non-production environment applications and infrastructure send metrics directly to Datadog for analysis and determination of any issues that would need to be looked at by the Infrastructure, Platform and Development teams for quick remediation. Using Datadog as this centralized Observability platform has enabled us to become leaner without sacrificing project timelines when issues arise and require triage for efficient resolution.

What is most valuable?

All of Datadog's features have become valuable tools in our cloud environments.

Our primary alerts, based on metrics and synthetic transactions, are the most used and relied upon for decreased MTTA/MTTR across all of our platforms. This is followed by deep log analysis that enables us to quickly and easily get to a preliminary root cause that someone on the infrastructure, platform or development teams can take and focus their attention on the precise target that Datadog revealed as the issue to be remediated.

What needs improvement?

The two areas I could see needing improvement or a feature to add value are building a more robust SIM that would include container scanning to rival other such products on the market so we do not need to extend functionality to another third-party provider. The other expands the alerting functions by creating a new feature to add direct SMS notifications, on-call rotation scheduling, etc., that could replace the need to have this as an external third party solution integration. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been a Datadog user for almost ten years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Datadog is very stable, and we've only come across a few items that needed to be addressed quickly when there were issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is very favorable, aside from cost/budget, which limits the scalability of this platform.

How are customer service and support?

Both customer service and support need a little work, as we have had a number of requests/issues that were not addressed as we needed them to be.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Neutral

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

Being an Observability SME, I have used many native and third party solutions, including Dynatrace, New Relic, CloudWatch and Zabbix. As previously mentioned, Datadog provides a superior platform for centralizing and consolidating our Observability layer. Switching to Datadog was a no-brainer when most other solutions either didn't provide the maturity of functions, or have them available, at all.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was very straightforward, and the integrations were easily configured.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented Datadog in-house.

What was our ROI?

For the most part, Datadog's ROI is quite impressive when you consider all of the features and functions that are centralized on the platform. It doesn't require us to purchase additional third-party solutions to fill in the gaps.

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

The setup was dead simple once the cloud integrations and agent components were identified and executed. Licensing falls into our normal third-party processes, so it was a familiar feeling when we started with Datadog. Cost is the only outlier when it comes to a perfect solution. Datadog is expensive, and each add-on drives that cost further into the realm of requiring justifications to finance expanding the core suite of features we would like to enable.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes, we evaluated several competing platforms that included Dynatrace, New Relic and Zabbix.

What other advice do I have?

They should provide more inclusive pricing, or an "all you can eat" tier that would include all relevant features, as opposed to individual cost increases to let Datadog to become more valuable and replace even more third-party solutions that have a lower cost of entry.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Michael Johnston1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at angel Studios
Vendor
Top 20
A great tool with an easy setup and helpful error logs
Pros and Cons
  • "The setup cost was minimal."
  • "We did have an issue where a synthetic test was set up before the holiday break, and we were quickly charged a great amount. Our team worked with Datadog, and they were able to help us out since it was inadvertent on our end and was a user error."

What is our primary use case?

We currently have an error monitor to monitor errors on our prod environment.  Once we hit a certain threshold, we get an alert on Slack. This helps address issues the moment they happen before our users notice. 

We also utilize synthetic tests on many pages on our site. They're easy to set up and are great for pinpointing when a bug is shipped, but they may take down a less visited page that we aren't immediately aware of. It's a great extra check to make sure the code we ship is free of bugs.

How has it helped my organization?

The synthetic tests have been invaluable. We use them to check various pages and ensure functionality across multiple areas. Furthermore, our error monitoring alerts have been crucial in letting us know of problems the moment they pop up.  

Datadog has been a great tool, and all of our teams utilize many of its features.  We have regular mob sessions where we look at our Datadog error logs and see what we can address as a team. It's been great at providing more insight into our users and logging errors that can be fixed.

What is most valuable?

The error logs have been super helpful in breaking down issues affecting our users. Our monitors let us know once we hit a certain threshold as well, which is good for momentary blips and issues with third-party providers or rollouts that we have in the works. Just last week, we had a roll-out where various features were broken due to a change in our backend API. Our Datadog logs instantly notified us of the issues, and we could troubleshoot everything much more easily than just testing blind. This was crucial to a successful rollout.

What needs improvement?

I honestly can't think of anything that can be improved. We've started using more and more features from our Datadog account and are really grateful for all of the different ways we can track and monitor our site. 

We did have an issue where a synthetic test was set up before the holiday break, and we were quickly charged a great amount. Our team worked with Datadog, and they were able to help us out since it was inadvertent on our end and was a user error. That was greatly appreciated and something that helped start our relationship with the Datadog team.

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using Datadog for several months. We started with the synthetic tests and now use It for error handling and in many other ways.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability has been great. We've had no issues so far.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The solution is very easy to scale. We've used it on multiple clients.

How are customer service and support?

We had a dev who had set up a synthetic test that was running every five minutes in every single region over the holiday break last year. The Datadog team was great and very understanding and we were able to work this out with them.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

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

We didn't have any previous solution. At a previous company, I've used Sentry. However, I also find Datadog to be much easier, plus the inclusion of synthetic tests is awesome.

How was the initial setup?

The documentation was great and our setup was easy.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented the solution in-house.

What was our ROI?

This has had a great ROI as we've been able to address critical bugs that have been found via our Datadog tools.

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

The setup cost was minimal. The documentation is great and the product is very easy to set up.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We also looked at other providers and settled on Datadog. It's been great to use across all our clients.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Updated: November 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Datadog Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.