Datadog Reviews

My customers were using Datadog for monitoring purposes. They were using it only because the solution is running on AWS and it's a microservices-based solution. They were using an application called Dynatrace for their log.

Most of the features in the way Datadog does monitoring are commendable and that is the reason we choose it. We did some comparisons before picking Datadog. Datadog was recommended based on the features provided.

Most of the monitoring tools nowadays are have or are going to have embedded artificial intelligence and machine learning to make monitoring and logging more proactive and intelligent. Datadog has incorporated some artificial intelligence.

The solution does not require a lot of maintenance.

The solution had all the features we were looking for and we were able to create a central dashboard as per our requirements.

All solutions have some area to improve, and in Datadog they can improve their overall technology moving forward.

I have been using Datadog for approximately four months.

Datadog is a stable solution.

Datadog is a highly scalable solution because it is a SaaS solution. Having this solution be a SaaS is one of its most appealing attributes. When the vendor is going to manage data scaling and everything for you, you are only going to use the solution as per your requirements. Autoscaling is a great feature that they have.

The support from Datadog is exellent. If you're stuck on something or you are facing any issue, support from the vendor itself is available. You will receive a response instantly from the vendor on anything related to the requirement,  issues, or feature you are looking for. The responses have always been in a timely manner.

I rate the technical support from Datadog a five out of five.

I have used other similar solutions to Datadog and when I do a comparison between the other tools Datadog is on top, it is great.

Since Datadog is a SaaS solution we had not deployed the Datadog on-premise or in any Cloud. We were using the SaaS solution from the vendor itself. From the provisioning perspective or from the monitoring and dashboard perspective, we were using Terraform to create the typical monitoring as code. Everything was basically automated, we were not doing anything manually.

If someone wants to set up Datadog on-premise or in any of the Cloud machines, they have to consider a lot of things from the auto-scaling perspective.

My recommendation is Datadog is very good. Your team can mainly focus on the development rather than the solution itself. The vendor is going to take care of auto-scaling and maintenance and everything for you.

I rate Datadog a nine out of ten.

We're using the product for logging and monitoring of various services in production environments. 

It excels at providing real-time observability across a wide range of metrics, logs, and traces, making it ideal for DevOps teams and enterprises managing complex environments. 

The platform integrates seamlessly with our cloud services, but browser side logging is a little lagging. 

Dashboards are very useful for quick insights, but can be time consuming to create, and the learning curve is steep. Documentation is vast, but not as detailed as I'd like.

The solution has made logging and tracing a lot easier, and the RUM sessions are something we did not have previously. Datadog’s real-time alerting and anomaly detection help reduce downtime by allowing us to identify and address performance issues quickly. 

The platform’s intelligent alert system minimises noise, ensuring your team focuses on critical incidents. This results in faster Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), improving service availability. 

It consolidates monitoring for infrastructure, applications, logs, and security into a single platform. This enables us to view and analyse data across the entire stack in one place, reducing the time spent jumping between tools.

Real user monitoring has made triaging any possible bugs our users might face a lot easier. RUM tracks actual user interactions, including page load times, clicks, and navigation flows. This gives our organization a clear picture of how our users are experiencing your application in real-world conditions, including slow-loading pages, errors, and other performance issues that affect user satisfaction. We can then easily prioritize these, and make sure we offer our users the best possible experience.

I'm not sure if this is on Datadog, however, Vercel integration is very limited. 

They need to offer better/more customization on what logs we get and making tracing possible on Edge runtime logs is a real requirement. It is extremely difficult, if not completely impossible, to get working traces and logs displayed in Datadog with our stack of Vercel, NexJs, and Datadog. This is a very common stack in front end development and the difficulty of implementing it is unacceptable. Please do something about it soon. Front end logs matter.

I've used the solution for a little over a year.

Our primary use case for Datadog involves utilizing its dashboards, monitors, and alerts to monitor several key components of our infrastructure. 

We track the performance of AWS-managed Airflow pipelines, focusing on metrics like data freshness, data volume, pipeline success rates, and overall performance. 

In addition, we monitor Looker dashboard performance to ensure data is processed efficiently. Database performance is also closely tracked, allowing us to address any potential issues proactively. This setup provides comprehensive observability and ensures that our systems operate smoothly.

Datadog has significantly improved our organization by providing a centralized platform to monitor all our key metrics across various systems. This unified observability has streamlined our ability to oversee infrastructure, applications, and databases from a single location. 

Furthermore, the ability to set custom alerts has been invaluable, allowing us to receive real-time notifications when any system degradation occurs. This proactive monitoring has enhanced our ability to respond swiftly to issues, reducing downtime and improving overall system reliability. As a result, Datadog has contributed to increased operational efficiency and minimized potential risks to our services.

The most valuable features we’ve found in Datadog are its custom metrics, dashboards, and alerts. The ability to create custom metrics allows us to track specific performance indicators that are critical to our operations, giving us greater control and insights into system behavior. 

The dashboards provide a comprehensive and visually intuitive way to monitor all our key data points in real-time, making it easier to spot trends and potential issues. Additionally, the alerting system ensures we are promptly notified of any system anomalies or degradations, enabling us to take immediate action to prevent downtime. 

Beyond the product features, Datadog’s customer support has been incredibly timely and helpful, resolving any issues quickly and ensuring minimal disruption to our workflow. This combination of features and support has made Datadog an essential tool in our environment.

One key improvement we would like to see in a future Datadog release is the inclusion of certain metrics that are currently unavailable. Specifically, the ability to monitor CPU and memory utilization of AWS-managed Airflow workers, schedulers, and web servers would be highly beneficial for our organization. These metrics are critical for understanding the performance and resource usage of our Airflow infrastructure, and having them directly in Datadog would provide a more comprehensive view of our system’s health. This would enable us to diagnose issues faster, optimize resource allocation, and improve overall system performance. Including these metrics in Datadog would greatly enhance its utility for teams working with AWS-managed Airflow.

I've used the solution for four months.

The stability of Datadog has been excellent. We have not encountered any significant issues so far. 

The platform performs reliably, and we have experienced minimal disruptions or downtime. This stability has been crucial for maintaining consistent monitoring and ensuring that our observability needs are met without interruption.

Datadog is generally scalable, allowing us to handle and display thousands of custom metrics efficiently. However, we’ve encountered some limitations in the table visualization view, particularly when working with around 10,000 data points. In those cases, the search functionality doesn’t always return all valid results, which can hinder detailed analysis.

Datadog's customer support plays a crucial role in easing the initial setup process. Their team is proactive in assisting with metric configuration, providing valuable examples, and helping us navigate the setup challenges effectively. This support significantly mitigates the complexity of the initial setup.

We used New Relic before.

The initial setup of Datadog can be somewhat complex, primarily due to the learning curve associated with configuring each metric field correctly for optimal data visualization. It often requires careful attention to detail and a good understanding of each option to achieve the desired graphs and insights

We implemented the solution in-house.

We use it to monitor and alert our ECS instances as well as other AWS services, including DynamoDB, API Gateway, etc. 

We have it connected to Pagerduty for alerting all our cloud applications. 

We also use custom RUM monitoring and synthetic tests for both our internal and public-facing websites. 

For our cloud applications, we can use Datadog to define our SLOs, and SLIs and generate dashboards that are used to monitor SLOs and report them to our senior leadership.

Datadog has been able to improve our cloud-native monitoring significantly, as CloudWatch doesn't have enough features to create robust, sustainable dashboards that are easily able to present all the information in an aggregated manner in one place for a combination of applications, databases, and other services including our UI applications. 

RUM monitoring is also something we didn't have before Datadog. We had Splunk, which was a lot harder to set up than Datadog's custom RUM metrics and its dashboards.

I really enjoy the RUM monitoring features of Datadog. It allows us to monitor user behavior in a way we couldn't before. 

It's useful to be able to obfuscate sensitive information by setting up custom RUM actions and blocking the default ones with too much data. 

I also like being able to generate custom metrics and monitors by adding facets to existing logging. Datadog can parse logs well for that purpose. The primary method of error detection for our external website is synthetic tests. This is extremely valuable for us as we have a large user base.

At times, it can be hard to generate metrics out of logs. I've seen some of those break over time and have flakey data available. 

Creating a monitor out of the metric and using it in a dashboard to generate our SLIs and SLOs has been hard, especially in cases where the data comes from nested logging facets.

I've used the solution for two years.

The stability is pretty good.

The solution is pretty scalable! It's hard to set up all the infra (terraform code) required to link private links in Datadog to all of our different AWS accounts.

They offer good support. Solutions are provided by the team when needed. For example, we had to delete all our RUM metrics when we accidentally logged sensitive data and the CTO of Datadog stepped in to help out and prioritize it at the time.

Positive

We previously used Splunk and some internal tools. We switched due to the fact that some cloud applications don't integrate well with pre-existing solutions.

The initial setup for connecting our different AWS accounts via Datadog private link wasn't great. There was a lot of duplicate terraform that had to be written. The dashboard setup is way easier.

We installed it with the help of a vendor team.

Our return on investment is great and is so much better than CloudWatch. We can easily integrate with Pagerduty for alerting.

Our company set up the product for us, so the engineers didn't need to be involved with pricing. 

The pricing structure isn't very clear to engineers.

We looked into Splunk and some internal tools.

We use this solution for our customer's IP and to support their cloud infrastructure.

Datadog is easy to use and easy to deploy. It's a better solution compared to others on the market in terms of being budget friendly for our customers.

Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server. Datadog is better than other APM or observability tools, but it focuses mostly on telling the customer what they need to know about the software, database or applications that land on the server. We also need to know the version before setting up an agent with the APM modeling tool.

In some instances, the owner of a particular software changes to another person and this person did not originally transfer the knowledge or data to manage the server. The new person needs to monitor this server and they need to know what software or version of software was installed on this server before they used the APM agent for monitoring. If datadog could provide this insight, it would improve how we use the solution. 

In a future release, we would like to be able to complete a network traffic or network flow analysis to detect the errors or problems on the network.

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We needed two engineers for the deployment.

This solution is budget friendly.

Overall, Datadog is a good product to use and is easy to deploy.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use the solution for monitoring, logging, and alerts. 

Thanks to Datadog, we report errors using the logger integrated into our services, which is crucial since we only do unit tests. The infrastructure team handles the monitoring part, so I can't give more insights about that. I am an API developer, so I use Datadog mainly for logging.

The alerts are connected to Microsoft Teams in a specific channel, and we pay a lot of attention to it, and we usually create tickets based on these alerts.

Thanks to the logs, we manage to make better reports through Jira and also to trace the request with more facility than we would be able to do otherwise. 

Since there are many teams in my company, the fact that we can share the trace of an error, for example, together with all the information about the log, we are able to save a lot of time when it comes to communication between everyone.

The most valuable feature for me so far is logging. We do not do integration tests, so we rely a lot on tracing all the requests and we report errors to different teams in the company together with logs that we take from Datadog.

Since I am an API developer, I do not use so much with the other features. Also, I have been in the company for only four months. I have only worked with monitors and alters.

I value tracing the request and being able to tell other teams which component, service, or line of code has an issue.

Since I have only been in the organization for four months, I only worked with the log, alerts, and monitoring. I do not have so many insights to share about what can be improved.

I am not an expert user, and not even an intermediate user yet. Rather, I am a beginner.

That said when the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us.

I've used the solution for four months.

I did not previously use a different solution.

I will get informed about this, I have no idea about costs as an API developer. But I get curious about it

I did not evaluate other options previously.

We used Datadog to capture the salvatory of our AWS fleet of around 1,200 servers.

Datadog's ability to group and visualize the servers and the data makes it relatively easy for the root cause analysis.

Datadog lacks a deeper application-level insight. Their competitors had eclipsed them in offering ET functionality that was important to us. That's why we stopped using it and switched to New Relic.

Datadog's price is also high.

I have been using Datadog for about three years.

Stability really wasn't ever an issue. We didn't have any outages specific to Datadog where we couldn't get reports or insights to information. We were more concerned about the stability of our own systems and applications.

There was no issue with scaling as such. It didn't scale well only from the cost perspective.

Fortunately, because of the stability of the solution, we never had reasons to deal with technical support. Most of our interaction was with their product management, which was focused on the feature capability and ultimately pricing.

It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal.

We switched from Datadog to New Relic because it offered ET functionality. Datadog was traditionally born out of monitoring infrastructure. Over the years, they have improved their ability to give you insights at the application layer and to be considered under APM. New Relic really started at the application layer and has worked its way down. 

Ultimately, we were able to accept New Relic because coming from an operations team, infrastructure was more important. As our application became more complex, our application developers needed better insight. Because there is a significant overlap in the Venn diagram between Datadog and New Relic, we felt that the needs of the infrastructure team and the applications team could be met with New Relic and its expansion in providing a sort of lightweight security.

Datadog started off at the infrastructure level, and New Relic started off at the application level. Both of them were expanding not only into each other's space but also into the SIM space.

There are a lot of options out there. For folks like me, it becomes a costly proposition because, at the end of the day, we're talking about logs, events that get pushed out. I have to push out some to Datadog and some to the security event manager. Then you start to think why can't you just push them to one place and let a product do that. That's where these products are trying to grow. They're not quite there yet because the SIM space is pretty mature. An enterprise like ours needs something fully focused and dedicated. Startups can live with New Relic that has a security capability or Datadog.

I would advise you to really understand the value that you're trying to go after. Make sure that you're not trying to solve all problems that you have from the observability perspective with Datadog because that will erode the value you get out of this solution.

Make sure that you are going to use Datadog for infrastructure, and it is going to be great. If you start adding other kinds of stuff to it, you'll probably start losing some of that value. Especially, if you want to go for application-level monitoring, you may be a bit disappointed.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten. I'm a very price-conscious kind of purchaser.

The soluton is used for full stack enterprise performance monitoring for our primarily cloud-based stack on AWS. We have implemented monitoring coverage using RUM for critical apps and websites and utilize APM (integrated with RUM) for full stack traceability.  

We use Datadog as our primary log repository for all apps and platforms, and the advanced log analytics enable accurate log-based monitoring/alerting and investigations. 

Additionally, we some advanced RUM capabilities and metrics to track and optimize client-side user experience. We track SLO's for our critical apps and platforms using Datadog.

We now have full-stack observability, which allows us to better understand application behavior, quickly alert users about issues, and proactively manage application performance.  

We've seen value by implementing observability coordinated across multiple applications, allowing us to track things like customer shopping and orders across multiple applications and services.  

For critical application launches, we've built dashboards that can track user activity and confirm users are able to successfully utilize new features, tracking user activities in real-time in a war-room situation.  

Datadog is our go-to tool for analyzing, understanding, and investigating application performance and behavior.

APM accurately tracks our service performance across our ecosystem. RUM gives us client-side performance and user experience visibility, and the rate of new features implemented in the Digital Experience area recently has been high. Log analytics give us a powerful mechanism for error tracking, research, and analysis.  

Custom metrics that we've created allow us to track KPIs in real-time on dashboards. All of these have proven valuable in our organization.  Additionally, Datadog product support teams are responsive and have provided timely support when needed.

Agent remote configuration should be provided/improved and streamlined, allowing for config changes/upgrades to be performed via the portal instead of at the host.   

Cost tracking via the admin portal is a bit lacking, even though it has gotten better.  I'm looking for usage trends (that drive cost) across time and better visibility or notifications about on-demand charges.  

Network device and performance monitoring could be improved, as we've faced some limitations in this area.  

The Datadog usage-based cost model, while giving us better transparency, is difficult to follow at times and is constantly evolving.  

I've used the solution for three years.

Support has been responsive and helpful.  

Positive

Pricing is straightforward. That said, it's sometimes difficult to estimate usage volumes.

We evaluated Datadog and New Relic in detail and chose Datadog due to their straightforward and competitive pricing model, and their full coverage of monitoring features that we desired, and an easy-to-use UI.