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.
"It is a good monitoring tool. Its stability is very good."
"The release management capabilities are great."
"AppDynamics has been stable."
"Capacity planning is, in my opinion, the most useful."
"It is easy to gain visibility into complex environments with AppDynamics. It has the ability to combine operation information of the environment and business information with strong business IQ support."
"The most valuable features of AppDynamics is the scalability and monitoring."
"AppDynamics is scalable."
"AppDynamics' most valuable features are the response time of the business transaction modules, the ability to monitor multiple services, and testing and developing environments."
"Anything I've wanted to do, I found a way to get it done through Datadog."
"The tools are powerful and intuitive to set up."
"The ability to easily drill down into log queries quickly and efficiently has helped us to resolve several critical incidents."
"I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The integration into AWS is key as well as our software is currently bound to AWS."
"The CCM, Workflows, Logs, APM, and RUM are all useful aspects of the solution."
"We really like the charts and visualization."
"AppDynamics scaled well up to around 3,000 agents. The performance deteriorated after that, while Dynatrace could support more than 10,000 agents. We were surprised that AppDynamics' scalability is not so good."
"If AppDynamics could do a one-agent function with their actual monitoring effectiveness, it will be the greatest tool."
"There are many KPIs that are not available in AppDynamics."
"The overall performance of this solution could be improved. The hot-hot infrastructure features could also be improved."
"The Log Analytics feature is a bit complicated."
"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."
"This solution is expensive."
"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."
"Datadog could make their use cases more visible either through their docs or tutorial videos."
"I'd like to see better pricing and more integration in the next release."
"The setup was a bit complex."
"We need more advanced querying against logs."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"I would like the tooling to have better integration in Slack, specifically sending out reminders to the relevant people to take breaks, do a retrospective, and specify with emojis which messages to log."
"We need more visibility into the error tracking dashboard."
"It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Management (APM) with 30 reviews while Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Management (APM) with 103 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 7.6, while Datadog is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Good tracing capabilities and helpful technical support but needs better analytics". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Datadog writes "Easy to set up and good UI but needs better customization capabilities". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Splunk Enterprise Security, New Relic and Azure Monitor, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, Splunk Enterprise Security and AWS X-Ray. 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