Amazon CloudWatch vs Datadog comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 8, 2022
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch
Ranking in Log Management
13th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
9th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Log Management
3rd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
138
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (1st), Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 6.8%, down from 7.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 9.9%, down from 10.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software
Unique Categories:
Log Management
1.6%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
9.3%
Network Monitoring Software
3.8%
 

Featured Reviews

Saurav P - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 26, 2023
The solution can be used for monitoring, analyzing logs, and collecting and aggregating infrastructure and application metrics
Amazon CloudWatch helps us with some monitoring, analyzing different logs, and collecting and aggregating infrastructure and application metrics. The solution also helps us with container metrics The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is collecting the logs from Lambda. The solution's…
Dec 6, 2022
Great dashboards, good monitoring, and easy SLAs
Our primary use case would be using the dashboards and getting proper insights based on the dashboards. The monitoring, SLO, and SLA have been better and easier since we started using the Terraform infrastructure. APM has been easier as we had to enable it through the CronJob directly. Profiling…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is its ease of use and logs. You do not have to go to each separate system to see the logs, such as Syslog and they are located in one dashboard GUI."
"You can automate actions or use AWS functionalities like auto-scaling, where you can configure the metrics to add more nodes if the threshold is exceeded."
"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."
"The monitoring feature is valuable."
"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap and easy-to-use solution."
"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."
"We use Amazon CloudWatch for logging."
"It is a robust analytical tool and it goes beyond mere functionality and extends into the realm of providing comprehensive insights."
"It has provided visibility with ease of implementation and allowed multiple teams to quickly onboard it."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The solution is useful for monitoring logs."
"The solution has helped out organization gain improved visibility."
"The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"Integrating Datadog with other platforms has made our monitoring processes a bit easier. It's not super simple, but it's manageable."
"I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."
"We can handle debugging and find out why things are breaking in our applications."
 

Cons

"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."
"It's not an advanced way of monitoring."
"The product's configuration has some challenges. The solution needs to be more user-friendly."
"CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."
"The solution's pricing is a bit higher."
"The product’s documentation must be improved."
"There could be further enhancements through CloudWatch's partnerships."
"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."
"Sometimes it’s difficult to customize certain queries to find specific things, specifically with the logging solution."
"I would like better navigability across pages."
"The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade."
"Deploying the agents is still very manual."
"The dashboard could be improved. It would be helpful to get a view of specific things that we need to monitor for our application."
"Their security features could be improved. We looked at their Security Monitoring feature but it was early in its development. Datadog are just getting into the security space so I'm sure this will improve in the future."
"We have recently had a number of issues with stability and delays on logging, monitoring, metric evaluation, and alerts."
"Datadog needs more local Asia-Pacific support, and if they don't have a SaaS solution in Asia-Pacific, they should offer an on-prem version. I'm told that's not possible."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Amazon CloudWatch is a cheap solution."
"The tool is not expensive."
"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable. When the rate of data collection is done the price will increase. The price is less than other solutions."
"The price is okay for me."
"The pricing is average."
"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."
"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."
"It is a free-of-charge service."
"The solution's pricing depends on project volume."
"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
5%
Educational Organization
34%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?
Amazon CloudWatch is a native service of AWS, and the bill is included with the other services in AWS. We receive a collective bill. The tool is not expensive. I rate the pricing an eight out of ten.
What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?
The integration with third-party tools must be made easier.
Any advice about APM solutions?
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 monitor...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
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 c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
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 ...
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.