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Datadog
What Is Datadog?
Datadog Real User Monitoring (RUM) provides insight into your application’s frontend performance from the perspective of real users. Every user journey is correlated seamlessly with synthetic tests, backend metrics, traces, logs, and network performance data, so you can quickly detect poor user experience and resolve issues with context from across the stack.
Who Uses Datadog?
Datadog is the monitoring, security and analytics platform for developers, IT operations teams, security engineers and business users in the cloud age.
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Reviews of Datadog
Great platform for logs analysis and cloud monitoring
Comments: Choosing to use Datadog made my work so much easier to accomplish. The logs analysis is one of the best thing that I can have in order to monitor my projects performance and health. This tool performs well and it is really useful. Real time logging works well. Definitely a must have.
Pros:
I think that the best features that Datadog has is that you can track and follow logs in real time, something really important to have if your project is live. I like the idea of creating custom views of sets of logs (with custom filters, data parsing and a lot more) and that you can share them with your team.
Cons:
It is a bit complicated to set for the first time. Is not quite easy to use or know at first about all the available features that Datadog has. Interface is tricky and can be a blocker sometimes. Following that, if your fields are not mapped in the right way, filters are not that useful.
Alternatives Considered:
Everything in a single pane of glass
Comments: I have had a great overall experience with the product, the customer success team, and the support team at Datadog. I would highly recommend.
Pros:
Datadog is a solid and stable product. They provide easy to use features and functionality that sets the standard for APM and Security tools - and their suite of tools is continuously expanding to important areas. The APM capabilities were able to handle our complex technology stack with little to no configuration necessary.
Cons:
Not necessarily a con, more of a caution to monitor your consumption.. We worked with the customer success team to ensure our account was right sized based on forecasted usage. In the beginning we had to monitor our on-demand consumption as we outgrew our initial needs, this was handled incredibly well by the Datadog team, but you do need to keep an eye on your own consumption to avoid additional costs.
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Couldn't install
Comments: If you can get it running I am sure it's good.
Pros:
Looks like it should do the job, less log limits than other products.
Cons:
Spent days trying to get it working on a pretty vanilla Windows VM but never could get it up and running. Support pretty much just told me to read the documentation which wasn't really helpful after going over it ten times already. Had similar problem with another product and they could tell me the exact lines of the config and registry that needed changing.
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The gold standard for cloud Monitoring
Comments: Before Datadog out logging and monitoring was spread out over different services, both home built and cloud based. With Datadog we were able to consolidate everything in one place and synergy effects of that has been amazing.
Pros:
If you can afford it. Get Datadog.It's a phenomenal product that keeps getting better every day.Especially if you're using multiple clouds.There are tons of integrations that gives you out of the box dashboards and metrics. Logs are easy to ingest from basically everywhere.It's expensive but the pricing is easy to understand and keep track of.
Cons:
It's expensive, there is no other way to say it. But they work hard to make it worthwhile, and for us it is.Beyond that I can't really think of anything.
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Analytics tool which helps customers and users always get the product you want them to get
Comments: Overall, having Datadog monitor our apps' performance and customers/users' pain points is invaluable. It's an amazing tool which lets us identify bottlenecks and better serve our users. Although the initial learning curve of utilizing Datadog's plethora of data analytics tools is steep, it's well worth the effort and price as there is much value to the metrics Datadog provides.
Pros:
Datadog is probably one of the most notable analytics tool out there for large companies. It's easy to track users' flow in terms of what routes they're hitting, when they hit a snag and 404, or other metrics like how performant certain requests are which allows us to identify bottlenecks and get rid of them immediately.
Cons:
There is a steep learning curve I will say with this software and needs an expert to help lead tutorials or sessions to get the ball rolling with new tool users. Although there are many built in functionalities and easily customizable features, it can be overwhelming and hard to pinpoint exactly what type of analytics you're looking for. It's one of those softwares where you have to play around with it to get the stars to align and find a model or metric that works best for your customers and use cases.
Datadog Review
Comments: Overall it's great monitoring/visualizing tool for any organization and I'd recommend, it would have been great if it had great learning resources to explore it more.
Pros:
- The filter functionality is great which lets you filter out errors for quick analysis, can easily create custom dashboards. - Great Visualizations, easy to set up dashboards/monitors with options do maths like ratios, rates, average, interval. - It can be easily integrated with other apps like Slack to set alerts for failed jobs. -
Cons:
- A slow learning curve, lack of resources on how to get useful functionality from UI or APIs. - UI sometimes be bit slower although not bad if you've integrated with multiple external apps.
Alternatives Considered:
DataDog is key component of our engineering stack!
Comments: Initially we had purchased DataDog to get some basic observability and to lift our logs into a central location. Quickly we began leveraging there additional features to gain deeper insights, better monitoring, and to speed up troubleshooting. DataDog is now a cornerstone of our software stack and everyone from engineers up and into DevOps/SREs use this on a day-to-day basis.
Pros:
The software can scale with the business needs. You can start with basic features or leverage many as you like (for $$) to gain deeper insights. Engineers once onboarded use it heavily to spot issues or troubleshoot more obscure bugs both in production and development.
Cons:
You often need to review usage and costs. Misconfigurations, migration projects (where legacy + new infrastructures are required), integrations which may cause double reporting need to be observed to prevent run-away spend.
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Powerful and flexible
Comments: We can connect traces, logs and events on our infrastructure. We can follow every HTTP request that arrives at our API to the individual services. If errors or other events occure we can see them, as they are connected with each request / trace. This helped us a lot in finding bottlenecks in our microservice architecture
Pros:
I really like that datadog offers a free tier to get startet with it. It helped building a net of monitoring around our servers and services. We have implemented a wide collection of (they call it synthetic tests) that we use as an continuous integration test suite. We even can monitor the performance of different application versions.
Cons:
Even if their locally installed agent on our servers is very flexible and can collect so many information, the configuration via YAML files is difficult to start with. The learning curve here is pretty steep in the beginning.
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Datadog is great but expensive
Comments: Please reduce the price gap between committed vs on-demand usage, or come up with some other ways to address it. Our on-demand cost varies so much and I get asked by finance way too often.
Pros:
-Best user experience-Unified view of all metrics. It is a lifesaver when troubleshooting performance issues-A broad range of product offerings
Cons:
-Expensive!-The pricing model isn't as flexible as it should be. You can only adjust your yearly contract 3 times per year.-Expect to spend more time managing costs than you would like.
Clear graphs and easy to set up
Comments: Used the open URL to add dashboard to a large monitor on our workspace to easily spot spikes.
Pros:
Really simple set up to monitor our full stack environment. Dashboard is very clear and suitable for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Cons:
Nothing really. Migrating to any product can be challenging but setup was pretty simple and no key functionality absent.
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Monitoring our micro services app with datadog
Comments: Use it every day, easy to implement
Pros:
All in one shop. APM, DB monitoring , synthetic transaction and log analysis
Cons:
APM does not work well on nodejs asyc services. Might be hard to track transactions.
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Datadog does a lot out of the box
Comments: We are using Datadog to monitor and observe over 3000 distinct video streams for outages. It does the job pretty admirably even if I can't tweak the alerts and dashboards as much as I'd like.It is VERY expensive. But it does a lot.
Pros:
It's pretty easy to get a lot out of Datadog right out of the box -- the AWS and other integrations are amazing and easy to use.
Cons:
It's REALLY expensive.It's not so easy to really really tweak the dashboarding and alerts to do more advanced mathematics or analysis.
Alternatives Considered:
Generally good, customer support could be better
Comments: Very helpful to have a full suite of observability tools. Customer support could be better.
Pros:
Overall observability is good, and the way all of the offerings interact is helpful.
Cons:
basic APM requires code customization, which isn't the case with competing products. Documentation for anything beyond basic integration is lacking. Customer support is a bit of a bait and switch; great during eval, and bad once you've bought the product.
Powerful tool for monitoring business applications
Comments: Datadog has been really efficient and useful since through its implementation you can monitor all business applications and thus be aware of its operation whether the same is appropriate or not and if not, you can take the appropriate measures so that the same is again the appropriate performance, that is why having this tool is a great advantage at the business level.
Pros:
Datadog is a tool that I like for several reasons, because implementing it does not require technical knowledge, has a series of metrics that allow you to read whether the performance of applications or servers is appropriate or not, so if you find a failure or something out of the ordinary in these applications the user immediately receives alerts that notify him of this problem so that it can be resolved in the shortest possible time, these alerts being received at any time since Datadog works continuously 24/7 and the best thing is that it is a software that is very easy to use and implement, in addition to being extremely flexible because it allows you to choose the monitoring parameters that you want to apply.
Cons:
Datadog is not a perfect tool because it has some drawbacks and is that the more applications are integrated with this software the performance or speed of information delivery tends to slow down which should not be since the integrations are to improve even more the performance of said tool.
Great end to end Integration
Pros:
Datadog is great for bootstrapping and it can get you quite far! Monitoring and alerting tooling is awesome, integrate well with the new products
Cons:
Datadog is one of the few solutions I’m the market that provides all stack (logs, security, apm, infra …) and they know it. It is not cheap, when compared individually but looking at the big scope the integration is what we are paying for.
datadog stuff
Comments: i have a great account team that really partner with me. the service is very useful and reliable
Pros:
the ease of implimentation and the ability to capture meaningfully info easilyquickly
Cons:
it's super expensive....almost cost prohibitive
best monitoring tool on the market
Pros:
I like Datadog APM which help our developer to troubleshoot various deep level issues.
Cons:
probably the integration with log management with DD trace with APM, as we have some difficulties link the log injested with trace ID etc but some of logs are not linked with APM. I hope there's a better compatibilities with custom PHP application with APM & Log management
Powerful tool for the analysis and monitoring of applications
Comments: Datadog is a very useful tool because it is known if the applications, servers or hots are working as they should or if not, we will be aware to prevent further damage solving the problem in the shortest time possible.
Pros:
This tool called Datadog I love mainly because it is really efficient and very useful because it allows through it you can carry out a monitoring of the performance of applications in a very simple way, being this through the reading of metrics that are really simple to understand and issue very detailed information that is useful to diagnose the cause and thus be able to solve the problem in the shortest time possible, also is available 24/7 so in case of any fault send immediately a mail informing the same and the best thing is that it has a clean interface, intuitive and easy to use without having technical knowledge to manage it.
Cons:
One of its drawbacks is that when it is integrated with a large number of tools it can become heavy, which causes the information to be slowed down.
Great server monitoring
Comments: They monitor everything we run at our company and we recently moved logging to them too. Very happy with support, had to ask them several questions over the years and they always know what I'm looking for.
Pros:
The metrics navigator, you start by picking a metric or server, and it then tells you all the information it is collecting from it, so you can start designing your monitoring dashboards and see the data that will appear as you go
Cons:
There are times where a chart would omit certain spikes, due to the way they aggregate values. But a quick email to support and they'll give you the settings you need to adjust not to miss such events, even when you look at a chart for the month
Alternatives Considered:
DataDog is one of our must-haves
Pros:
It's got everything that's needed for infrastructure and application monitoring and alerting. It also fits extremely well into our Infrastructure-as-Code paradigm where everything we set up is kept in a git repository as a Terraform project. DataDog is what we recommend and implement for our clients, and provides more useful features than Sensu.
Cons:
Metrics and monitors don't render correctly on mobile phones. It's totally unusable in portrait mode, and barely usable in landscape mode.
Alternatives Considered:
Logs for the programmers and sysadmin
Pros:
Able to ingest system logs, app logs, and other logs along with process stats and system metrics to get a wholistic picture of how your servers and applications are running for your business.
Cons:
Setup does take a while and there is several configuration files to adjust, but once this is done you will not need to touch them again for the lifecycle of the install.
Alternatives Considered:
Datadog experience
Comments: It's a good tool, needs to improve the collaboration of the support team.
Pros:
Building Dashboards, Observability at the granular level
Cons:
Terminology , need to distinguish different resources and not tag them as one
Great first step for data tracking and incedent monitoring.
Pros:
I use this tool on a daily basis for handling errors both in our live environment and for testing. It allows me to see where an error may be coming from and follow it through to its source. I could not do my job effectively without datadog
Cons:
The filtering of data is not as comprehensive as I would like. I sometimes need to search through the results to find what I need. Displaying a record in the chronological order is not always perfect and I sometimes don't get the context I want.
Alternatives Considered:
DataDog Review
Comments: I think Datadog is the best observability and monitoring platform out there, I think the only con and thing you have to watch out for is its crazy expensive
Pros:
The breath of features you can have under Datadog is truly impressive, everything from Application, Website, Synthetic monitoring is covered under Datadog, so you have all your observability needs on one platform
Cons:
Pricing, it can get really expensive monitoring on Datadog.
Many integration options and plethora of dashboards and visualizations
Comments: Dependable and reliable solution.
Pros:
Configuring monitoring tools is not always trivial, half of the battle is making sure metrics are flowing. Datadog is very flexible when it comes to sending metrics to their cloud. You can use collectD, statsd, file beats, or the 84523982 other options. Our orchestration software already had an option to enable Datadog collection. Once the data is in place, you need to figure out what metrics are relevant. Datadog has a number of pre-built dashboards tweaked for popular software systems. If you are using something homegrown, they can provide recommendations and optimizations after enough data has been ingested. API and documentation are top notch and we were able to build integrations quite easily.
Cons:
Datadog is purely cloud-based system so there's no on-prem option, only SaaS. Depending on your company, this may be a deal-breaker since all of your metrics data is hosted in the cloud. Since it's a SaaS based service, it won't be easy to move data to another service. Occasionally web UI will bog down but it's fairly performant for the most part.