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.
"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."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."
"The solution effectively monitors golden signals like CPU, page requests, and queues."
"Our team finds it overall quite useful."
"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."
"CloudWatch immediately hooks up and connects to the KPIs and all the metrics."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The ability to easily drill down into log queries quickly and efficiently has helped us to resolve several critical incidents."
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"The flexibility to create notebooks and dashboards and fully customize them gives us a lot of power to track the exact services and endpoints we are working on."
"We enjoy the multistep API tests."
"The most valuable feature I have found is the elastic container service."
"We rely heavily on the API crawlers that Datadog uses for cloud integrations. These allow us to pick up and leverage the tags teams have already deployed without having also to make them add them at the agent level."
"Sometimes it's more user friendly for development teams. There are some parts of Datadog that are more understandable for development teams. For example, the APM in Datadog works more manually and works like the tools in New Relic or Grafana, or Elastic. It is easier to understand for software development teams."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"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."
"We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog."
"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."
"This product lacks some features: real-time data stream monitoring, application performance monitoring, mobile app monitoring, and live dashboards. Its workflows also need improvement."
"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."
"The solution's integration could be easier for laypersons."
"The configuration capabilities could be better."
"I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services."
"I'm still exploring the trial version, and it is fine. One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report. This is something that could be improved. I probably need to navigate to a place to access the reports."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"At times, it can be hard to generate metrics out of logs."
"We need more advanced querying against logs."
"There is always room for improvement when dealing with cloud-based technologies. Mainly, I would say, it's just increasing our offerings to attract various other types of industries and businesses across more fields."
"It is very difficult to make the solutions fit perfectly for large organizations, especially in terms of high cardinality objects and multi-tenancy, where the data needs to be rolled up to a summarized level while maintaining its individual data granularity and identifiers."
"We would like to see smaller or shorter tutorials and video sessions."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 9th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 10 reviews while Datadog is ranked 1st in Cloud Monitoring Software with 101 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 7.6, 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 "Provides insightful analytics and good visibility that assist with making architectural decisions". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Google Stackdriver, Nagios XI, Azure Cost Management and SolarWinds NPM, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, New Relic APM, Azure Monitor, Splunk and Elastic Security. 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.
