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."
"CloudWatch immediately hooks up and connects to the KPIs and all the metrics."
"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."
"Setting up this product was easy. I found data analytics as its most valuable feature."
"Our team finds it overall quite useful."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"The solution effectively monitors golden signals like CPU, page requests, and queues."
"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."
"We integrate our application logs. It is great to be able to tie our metrics and our traces together."
"APM and tracing are super useful."
"We have way more observability than what we had before - on the application and the overall system."
"I have found some of the most valuable features to be the way things all come together that gives us a point of view that is useful. The panel is very beautiful and customizable."
"Having a wealth of information has helped us investigate outages, and having historical data helps us tune our system."
"I like that you can build out a dashboard pretty quickly. There are some things that come out of the box that you don't really need to do, which is great because they're default settings."
"The service catalog helped improve our organization by giving a good view of the flow for our microservices applications."
"For us to have visibility into our app stack and the hardware we run has been highly beneficial."
"We'd like the interface to be as easy as Datadog."
"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."
"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."
"I would like to monitor inbound and outbound transfer. I would also like to control the traffic for load balancing."
"The configuration capabilities could be better."
"I do not know whether or not CloudWatch can be integrated with on-prem services."
"We need more advanced querying against logs."
"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."
"Once agents are connected to the Datadog portal, we should be able to upgrade them quickly."
"In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages."
"I've found that the documentation is lacking in certain regards."
"The parallel editing of the dashboards should not cause users to lose the work of another person."
"I'm not sure what kind of features are in the roadmap right now, but I encourage the development of features for defining your organization, and allowing the visibility of what kind of metrics you can get. Those features would be really useful for us."
"The more tools that they can build that allow you to run AWX playbooks, or other similar fixes, would benefit clients greatly."
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.
