Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS X-Ray
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
14th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
138
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (2nd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 4.2%, up from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 9.3%, down from 12.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Unique Categories:
No other categories found
Network Monitoring Software
3.8%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
5.5%
 

Featured Reviews

Parth Solanki - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 29, 2022
Saves time, is relatively cheap, and helps find errors
It's basically like a cloud stack.  You can trace your entire HTTP request. Once you have submitted any request, it will be addressed as a 500 Error or 401 Error, or if there is any exception happening when this request, and how much time will take. X-Ray can trace all the information about the…
SM
Dec 6, 2022
Good observability and dashboards with increased visibility
Observability is a key use case, as is security. With this product, we get more visibility into our K8s clusters and more intelligent alerting. Datadog dashboards are pretty great. We need more integration with security tools like Drata. I've used the solution for three years.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most important one is compliance. We're able to achieve our regulatory levels. We're able to achieve the security level that we need for the federal government."
"The most promising feature of AWS X-Ray is that you can debug the issues through the proper logs. You can also get an analysis out of the logs for some use cases, though I have yet to try all the features of AWS X-Ray."
"It is a very scalable solution."
"AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process."
"AWS X-RAY identifies bottlenecks in terms of stability and performance and how long certain data lives in terms of response time and duration."
"The solution has made it easier for us to trace the problems that we have with our requests and to monitor the timing of each step in each request we do in our endpoints."
"Datadog is constantly adding new features."
"I have found error reporting and log centralization the most valuable features. Overall, Datadog provides a full package solution."
"It has empowered all our platform engineers with a very powerful and easy to use monitoring system."
"We integrate our application logs. It is great to be able to tie our metrics and our traces together."
"The visibility that it provides is valuable. It is helping in being proactive around incident management. It is helping us to be able to get more visibility into our customers' applications so that we can assist them at the application layer. We also provide them the infrastructure from an AWS standpoint. We are able to make sure that our customers are aware of certain critical things around the analytical piece of either the network or the application. We're able to call customers before they even know about the issue. From there, we can start putting together some change management processes and help them a bit."
"We find they have a very helpful alert system."
"The feature I have found most valuable is when I can reuse existing monitors and alerts for new dashboards."
"Excellent autocomplete for everything in the UI."
 

Cons

"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."
"Like most Amazon products, the user interface, configuration, and tuning aren't the easiest. That's the biggest reason why people tend to go to products like TerraForm and Terragrunt. We use TerraForm and Terragrunt. So, for setting things up and interacting with X-Ray, it's definitely the user interface that can be better."
"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."
"What needs to be better in AWS X-Ray is the log filtering. Predefined filters could be helpful because the power of analytics comes from how you can filter the data. I also want to see more KPIs from AWS X-Ray."
"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."
"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements."
"Managing dashboards as IaC is a bit hard to work out at times."
"There are things about it that we would like to be fixed, such as it is taking averages of average. This results in data that we don't expect."
"The pricing model could be simplified as it feels a bit outdated, especially when you look at the billing model of compute instances vs the containers instances."
"The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages."
"Datadog is so feature-rich that it is often hard to onboard new folks and tough to decide where to invest time."
"Its pricing model can be improved. Its settings should be improved for a better understanding of billing. They should also provide some alerts when there is an increase in the usage. For example, if there is 20% more increase from one week to another, the customer should get an alert."
"They could have better log reporting."
"The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."
"As you develop a relationship with Amazon, your pricing gets lower. You get credits for the amount of the system you use, and then if you're the government, you can get government pricing. For commercial users, there's a hump when you go from small to medium to big enterprise. Small businesses can live pretty easily off the free tier in a lot of cases, but when you go from a medium to a big enterprise, it becomes more expensive on a per-user basis. I'd like to see that curve going in a different way where pricing can be driven down while people are trying to adopt the technology."
"The solution is a bit expensive."
"It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
"Datadog does not provide any free plans to use the solution. When I start with a proof of concept it would be sensible to have a free plan to test the tool and check whether it fits the requirements of the project. Before the production stage, it is always good to have a free plan with some limited features, number of requests, or logs."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."
"They prefer monthly subscriptions."
"It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
5%
Educational Organization
34%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS X-Ray?
AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process.
What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?
They can improve how traces are sent to other providers.
Any advice about APM solutions?
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 monitor...
Datadog vs ELK: which one is good in terms of performance, cost and efficiency?
With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good c...
Which would you choose - Datadog or Dynatrace?
Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network ...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow
Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS X-Ray vs. Datadog and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.