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.
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.
"Cloud Secure is definitely the most valuable feature and being able to see file level activity. It gives real-time alerting on possible ransomware attacks and provides file security review. It helps us to see if something abnormal is happening on the system before it's too late."
"It is good for giving an overview of the systems and for tracking long-term trends. It is handy for root cause analysis, e.g. it can eliminate whether storage is the cause of an issue."
"Among the most valuable features are the queries and reporting that allow us to look at the utilization of resources, at how well the storage is performing, and to report on which resources are being used by which business units. We can track usage across the entire environment, across applications, business units, cost centers, etc."
"Its ability to quickly inventory our resources, figure out interdependencies across them, and assemble a topology of your environment is brilliant. There is a price associated with it. Whenever you target a NetApp environment, it is included in the price but whenever you want to add different vendors, like VMware and Cisco, the price greatly spikes. Inventorization helps us a lot to visualize the environment."
"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."
"The solution gives us very good real-time data."
"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."
"The solution is easy to use."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."
"The fact that everything is under a single pane of glass is really valuable, as developers don't have to spend their time copying correlation IDs across tools to find what they need."
"We find they have a very helpful alert system."
"The most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs."
"The performance of Datadog is good."
"The most valuable features are logging, the extensive set of integrations, and easy jumpstart."
"Its integration definitely stands out. It provides seamless monitoring of all our systems, services, apps, and whatever else we secure and monitor. Visualizations have become simpler with dashboards. We are getting visibility into systems, services, and apps stack through a single pane of glass, which is good. We are able to put logs in context."
"Having a clear view, not only of our infrastructure but our apps and services as well, has brought a great added value to our customers."
"Having a wealth of information has helped us investigate outages, and having historical data helps us tune our system."
"When I did need support because I was having problems with the solution, the first or the second line just didn't understand it. They were providing this only on a software as a service basis. So, they were asking all the wrong questions."
"There is room for improving the creating and managing or modifying of reports. That is still a difficult task to do and requires knowledge beyond the storage itself. I would love to see reporting improved so that we can create reports by dragging and dropping pieces into a report form and publish a report that way."
"Their pricing model needs improvement."
"In a perfect world we would have something built, right out-of-the-box, that can identify what we call "noise," and reduce the amount of data. You're presented with so much data when you first start the data collectors. For example, it brings back a lot of change rates that happen just because of standard computing, like profile changes and that sort of thing. Being able to identify things like that and categorize them and strip it down—and it probably can do that, I just haven't gotten there yet—would be very beneficial."
"This product lacks some features: real-time data stream monitoring, application performance monitoring, mobile app monitoring, and live dashboards. Its workflows also need improvement."
"The configuration capabilities could be better."
"For monitoring applications or for APM, CloudWatch has some limitations. You cannot monitor application performance from CloudWatch, and you have to go for a third-party tool."
"I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services."
"I would like to monitor inbound and outbound transfer. I would also like to control the traffic for load balancing."
"The drill-down aspect on the dashboard of the solution needs improvement. We get a very good high-level overview, but when we drill down, it becomes a little less clear. We have given this feedback to AWS as well and hope they will improve this in the future."
"Datadog has a lot of features kind of cramped into one dashboard. It's quite hard to get around what feature does exactly what. There was a steep learning curve, trying to navigate through menus."
"The error traceability is an area that can be improved."
"It could use some additional features when working with metrics like Grafana or like New Relic has. Datadog does not use library technologies like Dynatrace does. Datadog has machine learning too, but it does not have this option in all layers of monitoring like infrastructure service process in applications."
"The incident management beta looks promising, but it is still missing the ability to automatically create incidents based on certain alerts."
"Its pricing model can be improved. Its settings should be improved for a better understanding of billing. They should also provide some alerts when there is an increase in the usage. For example, if there is 20% more increase from one week to another, the customer should get an alert."
"All solutions have some area to improve, and in Datadog they can improve their overall technology moving forward."
"Could be a little more user friendly."
"It can have an artificial intelligence component. Even though I can seamlessly look at end-to-end security, it would be better to have alerts and notifications powered by an AI engine. I am not sure if they have an AI component. We have not reached out to them or looked at it, but this is something that I keep on talking about within our company in terms of features. Such a feature would be good to have, and it would further optimize my Security Ops team's abilities."
Earn 20 points
Monitor and optimize all your organization's infrastructure even while working from home. Sign up for the 30-day trial to see how NetApp Cloud Insights helps to maintain availability, optimize cloud spend, and identify data security threats.
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 12th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 6 reviews while Datadog is ranked 2nd in Cloud Monitoring Software with 32 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 7.6, while Datadog is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Easy to set up metrics repository with good data analytics, but lacks real-time data stream monitoring". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Datadog writes "Provides insightful analytics and good visibility that assist with making architectural decisions". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Google Stackdriver, SolarWinds NPM, Nagios XI and Sumo Logic Security, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, New Relic APM, Azure Monitor, Splunk and Elastic Observability. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Datadog report.
See our list of best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors.
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.
