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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.

We needed a tool to know what the space inside of the infrastructure is like. My work was to use Zabbix to get information about the IT infrastructure in the village or in the towns that are very far from the headquarters. I had to use Zabbix to provide information with maps that the IT was working and so that the headquarters can see in real-time what the healyh of the IT infrastructure we had deployed in the electrical network is.

After this experience, I tried Zabbix in african organization based in my country and it was used to monitor the IT infrastructures in three countries, cameroon, benin and ivory coast. For the moment, Zabbix is not yet very popular here but I really appreciate it and really want to make people know that it's very simple to use. 

In 2023 i tried Zabbix 6.0 on Rocky Linux 9. And news features like pdf report have improved my Admin Sys routine.

Zabbix has improved the daily monitoring tasks by making them easier and faster.

The feature that I find most valuable is the stateful map. In fact, the Zabbix map designing tools permit to make monitoring stateful maps with topologies similar to the reals IT network maps.

My company wanted to do an exercise command to access IT from Cameroon. They wanted to access an FSS to a second host with second equipment that was on another coast but it is not possible on Zabbix to do it. They want to directly access from the front-end of Zabbix to access a prompt in Zabbix to an access terminal. In the front-end, there is no way to do that. That would be an important improvement. 

II have been using this product for seven years.

It is very scalable because I tried version 5. I used 5 from 0 and I see that they have improved many things, but there is not yet this option to have an access terminal where you have many functionalities. 

The scalability works fine because the community is very active. When a new version comes out, we can see that they have tried to add.

The technical support is very quick. When I have a problem and I post it in the community, they answer me very quickly. For now, i don't need any technical support. 

Positive

In fact, even if I have looked at Nagios first, before Zabbix I did not really use it or any other monitoring solution.

The initial setup was very quick. The first time it was long because I didn't know it yet. I was only using Windows. The first time was very difficult because of the operating system. 

I implement Zabbix in-house with as outsourcing offficials webs tutorials

Zabbix exploitation has dispensed with financing frequent visits to the technical area through alerts, notifications, and stateful maps. Thus, the return on investment is more than 100%.

Zabbix is an effective cheaper network monitoring solution because it doesn't need any ongoing cost due to licensing.

Before choosing Zabbix, we evaluated Nagios but we were not comfortable with notifications messages syntax and configurations.

I would recommend Zabbix to people who want to monitor a simple network.

I have found that the literature on the website is not very easy for some people. They want to be in those to read more about Zabbix, how to install it, and what the normal problems are.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.