Amazon CloudWatch vs Datadog comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jun 8, 2022

We performed a comparison between Amazon CloudWatch and Datadog based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Amazon CloudWatch users say that its initial setup is straightforward. Most Datadog users say that its initial setup is straightforward, but a small percentage disagree, and say that the setup is complex.

  • Features: Users of both products are satisfied with their scalability and stability. Amazon CloudWatch reviewers like its metrics and data analytics but would like more control over the traffic for load balancing. Datadog reviewers say it provides them with good visibility and that it is straightforward to integrate and automate but would like to see better application-level insights.

  • Pricing: Amazon CloudWatch reviewers feel that its price is fair. In contrast, most Datadog reviewers feel that it is an expensive product.

  • Service and Support: Reviewers of both solutions report being satisfied with the level of support they receive.

  • ROI: Amazon CloudWatch reviewers do not mention ROI. Datadog reviewers report seeing an ROI.

Comparison Results: Datadog ultimately won out in this comparison. According to reviews, Datadog appears to be a more comprehensive and high performing solution. Amazon CloudWatch does come out on top in the setup and pricing categories, however.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudWatch vs. Datadog Report (Updated: March 2023).
686,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature.""What my company likes best about Amazon CloudWatch is that it's on AWS. My team also likes it for its log feature. As the solution is on AWS, it also has good pricing and resource availability, plus it's what clients choose. My company also chose AWS for Forge ECS, and at the time, there was a need for the log features provided by Amazon CloudWatch, so it's the solution my team went with.""The alarms are one thing I love about AWS CloudWatch. It has alerts that notify us when resource use is approaching the limit.""The solution effectively monitors golden signals like CPU, page requests, and queues.""You can enable alarms and metrics, and it has robust integration with AWS services. You can also trigger events. For example, if the CPU utilization is above 80%, it can launch a new instance for you.""It's a very simple logging system.""We have found the pricing to be reasonable.""Our team finds it overall quite useful."

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"APM and tracing are super useful.""The many dozens of integrations that the solution brings out of the box are excellent.""It brings in observability, monitoring, and alerting capabilities - all of which we need to operate at scale.""The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc.""The observability on offer is the most useful aspect of the product.""The solution has improved the organization by providing good insights into app performance and offering good dashboards.""The most valuable aspect is the APM which can monitor the metrics and latencies.""I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."

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Cons
"What would make Amazon CloudWatch better is if it includes more on-site checks, particularly status checks on the CPU, network input/output, etc. It would also be helpful if there's built-in swap space, disk, and memory monitoring in Amazon CloudWatch because, at the moment, my team has to configure it manually through a shell script.""It's not an advanced way of monitoring.""I think something that can be improved are the alerts and alerting mechanism based on no rejects. We want to have it more flexible and that is one of the key things that is required.""The graphical interface has room for improvement. CloudWatch only gives you a breakdown of what's wrong. However, it would be nice if it could automatically remedy the problems it identifies. You should be able to configure it so that when a specific condition arises, it will take a predefined action.""I found several areas for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch. First is that it's tough to track issues and find out where it's going wrong. The process takes longer. For example, if I get an exception error, I read the logs, search, go to AWS Cloud, then to the groups to find the keyword to determine what's wrong. Another area for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch is that it's slow in terms of log streaming. It requires an entire twenty-four hours for scanning, rather than just one hour. This issue can be solved with Elasticsearch streaming with Kibana, but it requires a lot of development effort and integration with Kibana or Splunk, and this also means I need a separate developer and software technical stack to do the indexing and streaming to Kibana. It's a manual effort that you need to do properly, so log streaming should be improved in Amazon CloudWatch. The AWS support person should also have a better understanding of the logs in Amazon CloudWatch. What I'd like added to the solution is a more advanced search function, particularly one that can tell you more information or special information. Right now, the search function is difficult to use because it only gives you limited data. For example, I got an error message saying that the policy wasn't created. I only know the amount the customer paid for the policy, the mobile number, and the customer name, but if I use those details, the information won't show up on the logs. I need to enter more details, so that's the type of fuzzy matching Amazon CloudWatch won't provide. If this type of search functionality is provided, it will be very helpful for businesses and companies that provide professional services to customers, like ours.""The solution could benefit from a price decrease.""The configuration capabilities could be better.""I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services."

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"The pricing should be less of a surprise.""I found the documentation can sometimes be confusing.""All solutions have some area to improve, and in Datadog they can improve their overall technology moving forward.""When the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us.""The pricing is a bit confusing.""The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages.""Managing dashboards as IaC is a bit hard to work out at times.""It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."

More Datadog Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Its pricing is reasonable. It is sometimes tricky, but it is reasonable as compared to others."
  • "What's were using is the free service of Amazon CloudWatch, so they're not charging us. As for hidden fees, we're not aware of them because we're using what our clients provided us."
  • "The pricing model is pay-as-you-go so you have to be mindful of usage to manage costs."
  • "Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."
  • "The solution is expensive."
  • More Amazon CloudWatch Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It has a module-based pricing model."
  • "I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."
  • "Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
  • "They prefer monthly subscriptions."
  • "Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
  • "Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."
  • "While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
  • "The price is better than some competing products."
  • More Datadog Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The portability of the Datadog is much more flexible for us. The client does not need to have Amazon services for the entire life of the project, unfortunately. They can change. But for Amazon to move… more »
    Top Answer:I'm an implementor, not a user. We are not a partner. I'm not sure which version of the solution is currently used, as it depends on the client's environment. I'd rate the solution at a seven out of… more »
    Top Answer:There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra… more »
    Top Answer:With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good core… more »
    Top Answer:Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network… more »
    Ranking
    10th
    Views
    6,948
    Comparisons
    5,653
    Reviews
    14
    Average Words per Review
    602
    Rating
    7.8
    Views
    56,213
    Comparisons
    38,195
    Reviews
    108
    Average Words per Review
    430
    Rating
    8.6
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, set alarms, and automatically react to changes in your AWS resources. Amazon CloudWatch can monitor AWS resources such as Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon DynamoDB tables, and Amazon RDS DB instances, as well as custom metrics generated by your applications and services, and any log files your applications generate. You can use Amazon CloudWatch to gain system-wide visibility into resource utilization, application performance, and operational health. You can use these insights to react and keep your application running smoothly.

    Datadog is a cloud monitoring solution that is designed to assist administrators, IT teams, and other members of an organization who are charged with keeping a close eye on their networks. Administrators can use Datadog to set real-time alerts and schedule automated report generation. They can deal with issues as they arise and keep up to date with the overall health of their network while still being able to focus on other tasks. Users can also track the historical performance of their networks and ensure that they operate at the highest possible level.

    Datadog Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by deploying Datadog include:

    • Gain an integrated view of the services and programs that IT teams are employing across their networks. Users can view and monitor all of the disparate programs that they have running across their networks with this one solution. They can track these programs across the entirety of the data’s life cycle.
    • Analyze and utilize massive amounts of data in real time. Datadog’s dashboards gather data in real time. Administrators can utilize their network’s data the minute that it becomes relevant to them. Decisions can be made based on the most current information available.
    • Keep your cloud network secured against digital threats. Datadog enables users to create alerts that will notify the minute that threats arise. IT teams and administrators can rapidly address any issue that comes up and prevent any existing problem from growing worse.
    • Easily get it up and running. Users can set up Datadog, configure it, and employ API integrations to connect it to external solutions with ease.

    Datadog Features

    • Customizable and prefabricated monitoring dashboards. Administrators are supplied with two different types of dashboards that they can choose from when they are setting up Datadog. They can customize the dashboards to fit any specialized monitoring need. Additionally, users can choose to use prefabricated dashboards that come with the solution.
    • Disaster recovery feature. Datadog has a built-in feature that enables organizations to continue functioning if some disaster strikes their network. If the network suffers damage, Datadog can restore lost data and infrastructure. Should a digital threat do damage to the network, Datadog ensures that the damage is not irreparable.
    • Vulnerability scanning tool. Users can keep ahead of threats to their networks by employing Datadog’s vulnerability scanning feature. This tool scans the entirety of a user’s network and warns them if a vulnerability is detected. Users can then move to patch these holes in their security before the threat to their network can escalate.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Datadog is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. It can offer organizations many advantages. Two major advantages are the dashboards that users can create and the monitoring capability that it gives system administrators.

    A senior manager in charge of site reliability engineering at Extra Space Storage writes, “The dashboards we created are core indicators of the health of our system, and it is one of the most reliable sources we have turned to, especially as we have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately. We can usually rely on logs to tell us what the apps are doing.”

    Housecall Pro’s senior director of DevOps writes, “We value the monitoring capability since it allows us to be pushed alerts, rather than having to observe graphs continually.

    Offer
    Learn more about Amazon CloudWatch
    Learn more about Datadog
    Sample Customers
    AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus
    Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Healthcare Company14%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    Comms Service Provider14%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government8%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Pharma/Biotech Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Educational Organization7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business35%
    Large Enterprise65%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise66%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise43%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise61%
    Buyer's Guide
    Amazon CloudWatch vs. Datadog
    March 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
    686,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 10th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 14 reviews while Datadog is ranked 1st in Cloud Monitoring Software with 108 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 7.8, while Datadog is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Instantaneous response when monitoring logs and KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Datadog writes "Easy to set up and good UI but needs better customization capabilities". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Google Stackdriver, Nagios XI, Azure Cost Management and NetApp Cloud Insights, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, New Relic, Azure Monitor, Splunk Enterprise Security and Sentry. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Datadog report.

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    We monitor all Cloud Monitoring Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.