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.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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.
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.
