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The usual use cases for PagerDuty Operations Cloud include incident management. I ran the infrastructure teams and SRE, so the primary use case was incident management and spinning up RCAs, tracking remediation. We also used it for identifying key stakeholders of projects. We relied on the escalation chains and the groups. Even if it wasn't an incident, if somebody had a question or they needed to get a hold of the CMS team, they would go into PagerDuty. We had a lot of integrations into Teams chat.

The heart of it was obviously kicking off pages from alerts within PagerDuty Operations Cloud. It was fully automated so that when an anomaly was detected, it automatically created an incident in PagerDuty. That automation was just table stakes. We also had some good automations to follow up and close out Jira tickets that would integrate with the PagerDuty incident. The primary one was simply calling the people when something happens.

My favorite feature about PagerDuty Operations Cloud is that it just worked. It was one of the tools we didn't have to worry or think about. It was very well polished. It did what they said they were going to do, and it didn't require a lot of customization. I think it facilitated us organizing the teams, groups, and escalation chains really well. However, there is no feature that stands out significantly.

PagerDuty Operations Cloud absolutely requires maintenance on my end. Escalation chains and people get stale very quickly. I wish it would integrate into org charts or an HR system so that when people get terminated or shift roles, PagerDuty knows about the changes. We had one escalation chain where it went up to an executive that wasn't in the company anymore.

The users would complain that they always had a hard time maintaining their schedules, their escalations, and installing the app. I got a lot of complaints from the people that responded to pages rather than from the people who administered PagerDuty.

The complaints I remember were about how users wanted to be notified. It was very common for somebody to misconfigure their own communication chain and not test it, so when an alert went off, their excuse was they didn't get the page or they didn't get the SMS. I got a lot of feedback from users that they struggled to do their shift when they needed someone to cover their shift. Often that wouldn't get done. Anything that can be done to make that as easy and simple as possible would be helpful.

I have probably used PagerDuty Operations Cloud for about five years total.

The stability of PagerDuty Operations Cloud has been great. I have not experienced any stability issues.

I have no problems with scalability. I have used it for like 500 engineers and experienced no issues.

I did not have any partnerships with them. I was just a customer and user.

I have used some alternatives. I used Grafana incident management a lot and we used something called RingCentral.

The initial deployment for a new client when starting with PagerDuty Operations Cloud was moderate. I would say it was more difficult because the biggest problem we had was just identifying who the responders were. It does take a bit of setup. We also did the Teams integration, which requires security and permission. The setup is always hard, though this is not necessarily a criticism on PagerDuty.

I am not current on what the current pricing is for PagerDuty Operations Cloud, but I assume it is per seat and per responder.

If I were to pick one, PagerDuty Operations Cloud is the one I would pick if there were no budget concerns. If I was budget-constrained, I would pick Grafana.

PagerDuty Operations Cloud did influence the volume and nature of alerts. We had more of them. I have implemented this three major times in my career, and the number of incidents immediately shot up and then came down. What happens is you identify the incidents more aggressively and then you actually fix the problems. I think that is a good thing.

I have not used Incident Workflows or Event Orchestration to automate toil from the incident management process. We played with it, but I did not use them in practice.

I did not use the AI agents at all. I would rate this review a 9.

Our main use case for Datadog is that we heavily rely on it for our infrastructure monitoring and application monitoring, including some of the browser-based application monitoring, which is RUM.

A specific example of how we use Datadog for monitoring is that we monitor our infrastructure CPU and memory utilization. Sometimes we see slowness and figure out CPU utilization was near the threshold, around 90-95%, which helped us to resolve the issue, underlying SQL problem, and that helped us to troubleshoot the issue.

In addition to our main use case, we also use RUM monitoring and synthetic monitoring, which really help us to look at our end-user sessions and proactively solve any slowness or errors spiking up.

The best feature that Datadog offers is infrastructure monitoring, where it can look at the CPU utilization, different process utilization, all the processes which are running, and alert us in advance if things are going beyond normal threshold.

I think everything about the features of Datadog is amazing. Datadog provides details up to the transactions. We can look at the transaction log too for the application, which is really helpful.

Datadog has impacted our organization positively since we were previously using AppDynamics and then we switched to Datadog. It has improved a lot in our alerting and monitoring in the infrastructure space and application space. We can monitor business transactions and take proactive action. It is really great to take actions on the issues before an end user reports it, which is a great advantage for us.

The world is moving toward artificial intelligence, so maybe we can have an inbuilt AI agent within Datadog, or maybe it exists and I have not used it.

The AI aspect would be great where we would not need to go and look at different transactions or different modules of Datadog, as AI can actually provide the data to us on Datadog UI. If we need more details, it could have a link to go to that specific module to look at more details for the application and infrastructure monitoring and alerts.

I have been using Datadog for three years now.

Datadog is stable for our organization, and we have not seen any downtime or issues so far.

Datadog's scalability has been great as it has been able to grow with our needs. As per our need, we are able to utilize different modules and there was never any need where we needed to scale anything else. We have limited our transition recording to 45 days, which helps. That is what our need is. It is really helpful and nothing additional is needed.

We reached out to Datadog only once to find out our AMI images, which we needed for our infrastructure as a code component, and it was a great experience. We got the required information and that helped us.

Neutral

Before Datadog, we previously used OpsRamp and also AppDynamics, and both of the tools we retired and moved to Datadog due to our enterprise approach to consolidate overall monitoring to Datadog.

I gave Datadog a nine out of ten because it is amazing. All the features and functionalities are amazing. The ease of implementation was a bit difficult for us for the database servers where we have different kinds of databases. We needed different kinds of agents to be installed, and that was a bit tricky for us. I think it is not on Datadog but it is about our complex infrastructure where we have a different set of infrastructure in place, so that created a bit of trouble during the implementation.

Since using Datadog, we have seen a return on investment with a lot of savings around infrastructure monitoring, and also on the people needed to monitor overall application and infrastructure on both sides. Previously we had thirteen contractors doing the monitoring for us, which is now reduced to only five. That is a huge saving.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing Datadog, we went with Datadog directly.

My advice for others looking into using Datadog is to keep exploring the tool and utilize the different modules and the different functionalities of features Datadog offers. There are multiple features and functionalities available with the Datadog agents which are really helpful and powerful to troubleshoot, alert, and monitor both applications and infrastructure.

So far, all the features I have used in Datadog are amazing. It captures all the logging information which I have, and I can include the links of Datadog transactions on my Splunk logs. It is integrated with Splunk and other platforms, which is great.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Datadog a nine.