We performed a comparison between AppDynamics vs Datadog based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: AppDynamics has an edge in this comparison because it received higher marks in the ease of deployment, pricing, and ROI categories.
"We appreciate the way that this solution allows us to monitor the ongoing status of the UI at any given time."
"The VPN is one of the solution's most valuable features for us."
"The monitoring so far has been good and we are happy with it."
"The simplicity of the dashboard is very good."
"There are many valuable features in New Relic APM. We developed some software applications and we are able to monitor the errors very easily. Their log security retention is very good."
"The stability of New Relic APM is very good."
"The alert mechanism is quite accurate when something goes wrong in your system. For example, if you have hundreds of APIs on your server, and any of the APIs is not performing well, you get an alert. When there is a drop or change in the threshold value, the beauty of New Relic is that within a fraction of seconds, all the stakeholders who are configured in the New Relic system will get an alert. That's one good thing."
"We like the performance of the product."
"AppDynamics is easy to implement if you follow the documentation, and the documentation that they provide is good."
"We're a large organization, so we appreciate AppDynamics' wide coverage. It may not work in all areas, but it has broad coverage. We can use the same dataset for different use case aspects. That is the beauty of AppDynamics. You can coordinate APM, EUM, and infrastructure through one dataset."
"Transition tracing is the most valuable is pretty easy and useful, but the user experience piece is also good."
"Capacity planning is, in my opinion, the most useful."
"AppDynamics has been stable."
"Technical support is helpful."
"AppDynamics is scalable."
"The solution helps us save a lot of time on certain tasks."
"Having a clear view, not only of our infrastructure but our apps and services as well, has brought a great added value to our customers."
"The most valuable feature is the dashboards that are provided out of the box, as well as ones we were able to configure."
"I have found error reporting and log centralization the most valuable features. Overall, Datadog provides a full package solution."
"The application performance monitoring is pretty good."
"The fact that everything is under a single pane of glass is really valuable, as developers don't have to spend their time copying correlation IDs across tools to find what they need."
"The ability to send notifications based on metadata from the monitor is helpful."
"The most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs."
"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."
"There has been some problem with the agent, and it is just not working well. It is not able to record information with the application server. They have been able to fix the issue, but it took quite a long time. This is the main issue in the APM products and also in New Relic. The mobile application monitoring has been pretty difficult to set up and also quite expensive. It should be a little bit easier and cheaper. Because it is pretty difficult and expensive, many customers don't take it."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"The older view is much better than the new view that they have. We'd like to go back to that previous version. The user interface just isn't as nice as it used to be."
"It is very difficult to award the service level cycles at an endpoint level."
"How granular I could go down at looking at certain data, especially related to the operations, is limited."
"We would like a dashboard feature to be created for this product. This would allow us to monitor both the front and back-end of our UIs performance, and then report on it."
"One thing that we noticed was that historical information was only for a limited period, which was not helpful in certain scenarios. For example, if I want to size my system for an event for New Year or Christmas season based on the historical data, I won't be able to find the historical data. Currently, the data is limited to three months. It would be helpful if they can provide historical data for a longer duration so that we can plan our system accordingly."
"New Relic APM can improve the information when we dig deeper to check a problem. There should be more detailed information provided."
"This solution is expensive."
"The training on the dashboards that is provided could be a little bit better, as could the use cases. They should have some good examples out there. As it is right now, I had to scour YouTube to find some stuff."
"AppDynamics lacks integration with cloud technology. It probably isn't a good fit for emerging enterprises because it's an on-premise solution, and many newer companies are moving to the cloud. AppDynamics' on-premise technology works reasonably well, but it doesn't have cloud features."
"If AppDynamics could do a one-agent function with their actual monitoring effectiveness, it will be the greatest tool."
"At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot. In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring. When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software."
"AppDynamics's agent management could be improved."
"The overall performance of this solution could be improved. The hot-hot infrastructure features could also be improved."
"There are too many installers available for this solution."
"Could be a little more user friendly."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
"Datadog does not have the feature where you can monitor external websites or check the SSL secure for websites."
"We have recently had a number of issues with stability and delays on logging, monitoring, metric evaluation, and alerts."
"The setup was a bit complex."
"Deploying the agents is still very manual."
"The incident management beta looks promising, but it is still missing the ability to automatically create incidents based on certain alerts."
"I think better access to their engineers when we have a problem could be better."
AppDynamics is ranked 3rd in Application Performance Management (APM) with 35 reviews while Datadog is ranked 2nd in Application Performance Management (APM) with 34 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 7.6, while Datadog is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Great dashboards, with good SAP monitoring but needs to be more reasonably priced". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Datadog writes "Provides insightful analytics and good visibility that assist with making architectural decisions". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Splunk, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Azure Monitor, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, Splunk, Amazon CloudWatch and Zabbix. See our AppDynamics vs. Datadog report.
See our list of best Application Performance Management (APM) vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Management (APM) 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.
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 monitoring. We maintain critical processing on our mainframe so there was a desire to include this in our transaction trace. Due to a highly mature ELK implementation, we are not trying to incorporate log analytics into solution buy may consider in the future. We had AppD, Dynatrace, New Relic, and CA Wily all in house at the time of our evaluation. We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing. Between Dynatrace and New Relic, Dynatrace won based on the automation, integrated AI, support for "old" techs, and confidence we could eliminate multiple APM and infra monitoring tools.
I would not include products like BigPanda, MoogSoft, in this analysis. They are not monitoring solutions but event correlation solutions. You will need additional monitoring products to capture data and feed them. Having said that if you cannot consolidate tools you will likely need to purchase an event solution to make sense of all the alarms. We did evaluate these products but with Dynatrace AI did not feel the business value was there for the investment.
Here's a quick pro/con list on Dynatrace & New Relic from our analysis.
New Relic Pros: Insights is an awesome product and capability. Lots of capabilities and plugins to extend data collection. The APM dashboard is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Good training and documentation are available to support the product.
New Relic Cons: Requires lots of manual configurations to implement and support. Insights product requires an investment of time to achieve value. Licensing is a nightmare as there is virtually no transparency in what you are being charged for. Lack of solution to consolidate alerts across implementation other than significant investment in insights to manually achieve this.
Dynatrace Pros: Very simple to implement and maintain with out of the box automation which supports modern (cloud/Kubernetes) and "old" (mainframe). In-app chat is helpful. High integration of infra and APM data for full-stack observability and engineering. Topology and trace discovery is more reliable than other products or our CMDB. Synthetics are easy to set up for any user. AI-assisted problem analysis on the trace discovery streamlines troubleshooting. AI includes "events" in an analysis like VMotion, deployment events. Have not done yet but looking to leverage monitoring as code for a fully integrated and automated delivery pipeline. See keptn.sh open source project.
Dynatrace Cons: User SQL lacks some functions of NRQL for user analysis. Host, process, and service data is not available to query within the product. Alarm processing lacks some granular controls. The Plug-in library is less robust.
Good luck with your decision!
We are currently going through a paper-based analysis to select an Enterprise APM solution.
Our Contenders are
1. Dynatrace
2. Cisco(AppDynamics)
3. Broadcom DX-APM
Shortlisted based on existing relationships with other products and services they provide.
We discounted New Relic- despite their growing capability - as they are yet to enter the enterprise APM solution scene.
With regards to your response "We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing .." :
Will you be willing to expand on Appd - what was your experience and issues w.r.t licensing. These could help us with our evaluation. Much appreciated. Regards Adrian
Could you please share your requirements ? There are a lot tools can be added to the list. I spent almost 6 months to test and check many tools then I select eG enterprise.
Thanks