Chronosphere vs Datadog comparison

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Chronosphere

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Datadog and Chronosphere are both real-time monitoring and observability platforms for cloud-based infrastructures. Datadog often has the upper hand due to its extensive integration capabilities and intuitive analytics, while Chronosphere stands out for its scalability and performance optimization features.

Features: Datadog is known for its extensive integrations, comprehensive dashboards, and insightful analytics. Chronosphere is recognized for its high scalability, efficient resource usage, and advanced performance optimization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog's deployment is straightforward with extensive documentation and active community support, offering accessible and responsive customer service. Chronosphere provides seamless deployment for large-scale environments with robust customer support, beneficial for large or complex infrastructures.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog offers various pricing tiers with notable ROI across many scenarios and attractive setup costs. Chronosphere often involves higher initial setup expenses but promises significant returns for large-scale operations due to performance optimizations and resource efficiency. Datadog's pricing is favorable for smaller operations, while Chronosphere delivers considerable ROI for enterprises needing scalability and resource management.

To learn more, read our detailed Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Report (Updated: April 2025).

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Chronosphere

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

32nd

Ranking in Log Management

35th

Ranking in AIOps

14th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Datadog

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

1st

Ranking in Log Management

3rd

Ranking in AIOps

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

188

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Chronosphere is 0.2%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 8.8%, down from 11.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Arvind Pant

Senior Data Engineer at DoorDash

Monitors pipelines with real-time alerts and good documentation

It isn't very easy. It's not easy for everyone. It would be much easier if there could be a simpler version, like a data number version or an SQL version. It's hard to debug if you don't know the syntax. Also, I saw the Slack alerts feature, which is pretty cool, but I cannot customize my messages on the Slack alerts. It would be great if it were possible to tag people in the alerts. At DoorDash, we have hundreds of pipelines, and if something fails, I want to tag specific people so they can start working on the issue immediately.

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Kevin Palmer

DevOps/Security Principal at Raken

Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation

Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The alerting features are good"

"The solution has improved the organization by providing good insights into app performance and offering good dashboards."

"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."

"Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most."

"It has turned into an operational dashboard. If you felt something is going wrong, you can immediately open up Datadog. It has been our go to application because we know the answer will be there."

"The most valuable aspect is for us to have everything in one place."

"I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."

"The feature I have found most valuable is when I can reuse existing monitors and alerts for new dashboards."

"The solution allows flexibility and heightened observability for presenting data, creating indicators, and setting service-level objectives."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"It's not easy for everyone."

"The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages."

"When I started using it years ago, it had stability problems. I remember, specifically, we ran everything in Docker containers. There were some problems getting it into a Docker container with very specific memory limits."

"Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs."

"I've only been using Datadog for a few months, and at first, it was frankly overwhelming in terms of both the UI and the available capabilities."

"The parallel editing of the dashboards should not cause users to lose the work of another person."

"Managing dashboards as IaC is a bit hard to work out at times."

"Stability of the product has been a concern for us outside of the primary monitoring agents."

"Sometimes it’s difficult to customize certain queries to find specific things, specifically with the logging solution."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"I am not satisfied with its licensing. Its payment is based on the exported data, and there was an explosion of the data for three or four weeks. My customer was not alerted, and there was no way for them to see that there has been an explosion of data. They got a big invoice for one or two months. The pricing model of Datadog is based on the data. The customer was quite surprised about not being alerted about this explosion of data. They should provide some kind of alert when there is an increase in usage."

"The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics."

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."

"Sometimes it's very hard to project how much it will cost for the monthly subscription for the next month when you add certain features. Having better visibility of the cost would give a better experience."

"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."

"They prefer monthly subscriptions."

"It is easy to run up a large bill, so become familiar with the cost of each piece of your bill and use the metrics they supply to estimate and monitor your bill."

"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Retailer

13%

Educational Organization

31%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Chronosphere?

What is your primary use case for Chronosphere?

I work as a data engineer, and we have many streaming pipelines. We use Chronosphere to monitor various metrics, such as how much data our pipeline is processing in each batch, the volume of incomi...

What advice do you have for others considering Chronosphere?

If you want to monitor pipelines and use something like Kafka or any streaming platform, Chronosphere is the best option for monitoring pipelines with real-time alerts. It is loosely coupled with y...

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 ...

Honeycomb.io vs Chronosphere

Comparisons

Compared 26% of the time

Grafana vs Chronosphere

Compared 18% of the time

Splunk Real User Monitoring (RUM) vs Chronosphere

Compared 17% of the time

Dynatrace vs Chronosphere

Compared 13% of the time

Splunk Observability Cloud vs Chronosphere

Compared 9% of the time

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Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 11% of the time

AWS X-Ray vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

More Datadog Competitors

Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download Chronosphere product report

Download Datadog product report

Overview

Chronosphere provides a robust platform for managing and monitoring cloud-native applications with features like real-time observability, incident management, and capacity planning. It offers scalable, detailed observability across complex systems, an intuitive interface, and cost-efficient resource management. Users report enhanced productivity, improved collaboration, and better decision-making, bolstering operational capabilities and organizational growth.

Chronosphere

Datadog is a comprehensive cloud monitoring platform designed to track performance, availability, and log aggregation for cloud resources like AWS, ECS, and Kubernetes. It offers robust tools for creating dashboards, observing user behavior, alerting, telemetry, security monitoring, and synthetic testing.

Datadog supports full observability across cloud providers and environments, enabling troubleshooting, error detection, and performance analysis to maintain system reliability. It offers detailed visualization of servers, integrates seamlessly with cloud providers like AWS, and provides powerful out-of-the-box dashboards and log analytics. Despite its strengths, users often note the need for better integration with other solutions and improved application-level insights. Common challenges include a complex pricing model, setup difficulties, and navigation issues. Users frequently mention the need for clearer documentation, faster loading times, enhanced error traceability, and better log management.

What are the key features of Datadog?

Graphs and Dashboards: Visualizes servers and infrastructure with customizable views.
Metrics: Offers deep insights into system performance and user behavior.
Log Management: Provides powerful analytics for logs and seamless log aggregation.
Unified Tagging: Facilitates organization and retrieval of metrics and logs.
APM and RUM: Enables application performance monitoring and real user monitoring for comprehensive insights.
Synthetic Testing: Allows the simulation of user interactions to test application performance.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

System Reliability: Helps ensure uptime and performance across cloud environments.
Proactive Issue Resolution: Assists in identifying and resolving issues before they impact users.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring and log management tasks.
Flexible Integrations: Adapts to various cloud services and infrastructure setups.
Real-Time Alerts: Provides timely notifications to address problems swiftly.

Datadog is implemented across different industries, from tech companies monitoring cloud applications to finance sectors ensuring transactional systems' performance. E-commerce platforms use Datadog to track and visualize user behavior and system health, while healthcare organizations utilize it for maintaining secure, compliant environments. Every implementation assists teams in customizing monitoring solutions specific to their industry's requirements.

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability