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.
"We use Amazon CloudWatch for logging."
"The initial setup is easy."
"We have found the pricing to be reasonable."
"It's a very simple logging system."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and UI."
"Every time we get an alarm or have an incident, CloudWatch is always there. We use it not only for resources we've spun up in the cloud, but also for some of our on-premises resources."
"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."
"Monitoring time and ensuring ease in it is the most valuable feature."
"It is easy to navigate the menu and create tests."
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"Datadog has made it much easier to have a central place for people to look for logs and made it much easier to notify them of any elevated error rates or failures."
"For us to have visibility into our app stack and the hardware we run has been highly beneficial."
"Datadog agents act as an integration to different services, providing easy access and management."
"Its integration is most valuable because you can integrate it with various service providers such as AWS, .Net, etc."
"The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"Excellent autocomplete for everything in the UI."
"It would be beneficial for CloudWatch to provide an API interface and some kind of custom configuration."
"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."
"There's a learning curve with Amazon CloudWatch since we have to learn to write the queries to extract the keys and logs."
"The dashboard and the UI could improve in Amazon CloudWatch. Additionally, they should focus on visibility inside the servers with AI and machine learning integrations. This would allow users who are using the solution to see what is happening within the system better."
"There could be further enhancements through CloudWatch's partnerships."
"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 product's configuration has some challenges. The solution needs to be more user-friendly."
"It's not an advanced way of monitoring."
"For three to four months, we have been experiencing real-time delays. For example, if we're monitoring incoming traffic, the real-time status should be displayed up to a certain point. However, due to delays or issues with Datadog, the real-time data might only be updated at an earlier time. We are experiencing consistent delays in data updates from Datadog, with the most recent data often being delayed by about an hour. This issue has been ongoing for the past four months."
"I found the solution to be stable, I did not experience any bugs or glitches. However, some of the managing team did."
"Sometimes, it takes a long time to load the dashboard if we have many charts."
"Datadog lacks a deeper application-level insight. Their competitors had eclipsed them in offering ET functionality that was important to us. That's why we stopped using it and switched to New Relic. Datadog's price is also high."
"Datadog is expensive."
"Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing."
"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."
"I would love to see support for front-end and mobile applications. Right now, it is mostly all back-end stuff. Being able to do some integration with our front-end products would be awesome."
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 12th in Log Management with 40 reviews while Datadog is ranked 2nd in Log Management with 137 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 8.0, 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 "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), Dynatrace, SolarWinds NPM and Nagios XI, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Coralogix. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Datadog report.
See our list of best Log Management vendors and best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors.
We monitor all Log Management 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.
