Datadog vs Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 4, 2023

We performed a comparison between Datadog and Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

Features: Users have favorable things to say in regards to Datadog's ease of use, convenient setup, useful dashboards, error reporting, log centralization, and troubleshooting features as well as the user-friendliness for development teams. It has a nice interface and is flexible. Google Cloud's operations suite is praised for its easy setup and monitoring capabilities. Datadog could enhance its usability, integration, user interface, learning curve, external website monitoring, SSL security, and setup complexity. Google Cloud's operations suite would benefit from extra metrics and tools, enhanced application logs, stability, improved logging functionality, and increased profiling capabilities.

Service and Support: The opinions about Datadog's customer service vary, with some users appreciating the quick and useful assistance they provide. However, there have been instances where support has been slow or unresponsive. Google Cloud's operations suite is known for its excellent technical support, although certain users have not required assistance from customer service.

Ease of Deployment: Datadog's initial setup is regarded as simple and uncomplicated, with help accessible from service providers or technical support. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) has a direct setup process managed by the DevOps team, with excellent documentation provided for assistance.

Pricing: Users have expressed mixed opinions regarding the setup cost of Datadog's product. Some find it to be expensive and confusing, and others feel that it is restrictive or unclear. Google Cloud's operations suite is viewed as a concern due to its pricing, although one user considers it to be very cheap.

ROI: Users have experienced varying levels of ROI with Datadog, with benefits such as time savings and reduced blind spots. On the other hand, Google Cloud's operations suite has consistently delivered a positive ROI for users.

Comparison Results: Datadog is the preferred choice when compared to Google Cloud's operations suite. Users appreciate Datadog's ease of use, convenient setup, useful dashboards, error reporting, log centralization, and troubleshooting features. They also value Datadog's user-friendliness for development teams, interface and integrations, flexibility, and observability.

To learn more, read our detailed Datadog vs. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It has a high-level insight into the infrastructure model of the application and provides important detailed data on the host and metrics, which is the main concern of our customers.""It has saved us a lot of trouble in implementation.""The integration and configuration are incredibly simple. The SaaS offering is remarkably easy to set up, especially if you're coming from a Graphite environment or anything that uses a StatsD.""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 most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs.""The solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments.""We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."

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"The features that I have found most valuable are its graphs - if I need any statistics, in Kubernetes or Kong level or VPN level, I can quickly get the reports.""Provides visibility into the performance uptime.""Google's technical support is very good.""The cloud login enables us to get our logs from the different platforms that we currently use.""I like the monitoring feature.""We find the solution to be stable.""The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS.""Our company has a corporate account for Google Cloud and so our systems and clusters integrate really well."

More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) Pros →

Cons
"I want to applaud the efforts in making the UI extremely usable and approachable. My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus.""Additional metrics should be included.""The ease of implementation needs improvement.""Datadog has a lot of features kind of cramped into one dashboard. It's quite hard to get around what feature does exactly what. There was a steep learning curve, trying to navigate through menus.""Datadog could make their use cases more visible either through their docs or tutorial videos.""The product needs a better Datadog agent installation.""The error traceability is an area that can be improved.""Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."

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"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it. My request goes through various levels of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and comes back to my client machine. Suppose that my request has taken 10 seconds overall, so if I want to break it down, to see where the delay is happening within my architecture, I am not able to find that out using Stackdriver.""Lacking sufficient operations documentation.""It could be even more automated.""While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace.""The logging functionality could be better.""It is difficult to estimate in advance how much something is going to cost.""The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient.""This solution could be improved if it offered the ability to analyze charts, such as a solution like Kibana."

More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
  • "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."
  • "Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
  • "At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
  • "The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
  • "It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
  • "The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
  • "It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
  • More Datadog Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."
  • "The cost could be lower."
  • "We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."
  • More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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 core… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:It could be even more automated. For instance, the moment you deploy something, the monitoring can be there for everything. You will just have to launch or click the console in the morning, and then… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    39,290
    Comparisons
    23,502
    Reviews
    94
    Average Words per Review
    433
    Rating
    8.6
    Views
    4,091
    Comparisons
    3,703
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    274
    Rating
    7.8
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Google Stackdriver, Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, Google Cloud Monitoring
    Learn More
    Overview

    Datadog is a cloud monitoring solution that is designed to assist administrators, IT teams, and other members of an organization who are charged with keeping a close eye on their networks. Administrators can use Datadog to set real-time alerts and schedule automated report generation. They can deal with issues as they arise and keep up to date with the overall health of their network while still being able to focus on other tasks. Users can also track the historical performance of their networks and ensure that they operate at the highest possible level.

    Datadog Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by deploying Datadog include:

    • Gain an integrated view of the services and programs that IT teams are employing across their networks. Users can view and monitor all of the disparate programs that they have running across their networks with this one solution. They can track these programs across the entirety of the data’s life cycle.
    • Analyze and utilize massive amounts of data in real time. Datadog’s dashboards gather data in real time. Administrators can utilize their network’s data the minute that it becomes relevant to them. Decisions can be made based on the most current information available.
    • Keep your cloud network secured against digital threats. Datadog enables users to create alerts that will notify the minute that threats arise. IT teams and administrators can rapidly address any issue that comes up and prevent any existing problem from growing worse.
    • Easily get it up and running. Users can set up Datadog, configure it, and employ API integrations to connect it to external solutions with ease.

    Datadog Features

    • Customizable and prefabricated monitoring dashboards. Administrators are supplied with two different types of dashboards that they can choose from when they are setting up Datadog. They can customize the dashboards to fit any specialized monitoring need. Additionally, users can choose to use prefabricated dashboards that come with the solution.
    • Disaster recovery feature. Datadog has a built-in feature that enables organizations to continue functioning if some disaster strikes their network. If the network suffers damage, Datadog can restore lost data and infrastructure. Should a digital threat do damage to the network, Datadog ensures that the damage is not irreparable.
    • Vulnerability scanning tool. Users can keep ahead of threats to their networks by employing Datadog’s vulnerability scanning feature. This tool scans the entirety of a user’s network and warns them if a vulnerability is detected. Users can then move to patch these holes in their security before the threat to their network can escalate.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Datadog is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. It can offer organizations many advantages. Two major advantages are the dashboards that users can create and the monitoring capability that it gives system administrators.

    A senior manager in charge of site reliability engineering at Extra Space Storage writes, “The dashboards we created are core indicators of the health of our system, and it is one of the most reliable sources we have turned to, especially as we have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately. We can usually rely on logs to tell us what the apps are doing.”

    Housecall Pro’s senior director of DevOps writes, “We value the monitoring capability since it allows us to be pushed alerts, rather than having to observe graphs continually.

    Real-time log management and analysis

    Cloud Logging is a fully managed service that performs at scale and can ingest application and platform log data, as well as custom log data from GKE environments, VMs, and other services inside and outside of Google Cloud. Get advanced performance, troubleshooting, security, and business insights with Log Analytics, integrating the power of BigQuery into Cloud Logging.

    Built-in metrics observability at scale

    Cloud Monitoring provides visibility into the performance, uptime, and overall health of cloud-powered applications. Collect metrics, events, and metadata from Google Cloud services, hosted uptime probes, application instrumentation, and a variety of common application components. Visualize this data on charts and dashboards and create alerts so you are notified when metrics are outside of expected ranges.

    Stand-alone managed service for running and scaling Prometheus

    Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, built on top of the same globally scalable data store as Cloud Monitoring. Keep your existing visualization, analysis, and alerting services, as this data can be queried with PromQL or Cloud Monitoring.

    Monitor and improve your application's performance

    Application Performance Management (APM) combines the monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities of Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring with Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler to help you reduce latency and cost so you can run more efficient applications.

    Sample Customers
    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
    Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Pharma/Biotech Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization31%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider29%
    Financial Services Firm29%
    Energy/Utilities Company14%
    Manufacturing Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise43%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise38%
    Large Enterprise46%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise70%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise70%
    Buyer's Guide
    Datadog vs. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 136 reviews while Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is ranked 21st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 9 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) writes "Good logging and tracing but does need more profiling capabilities". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Coralogix, whereas Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is most compared with AWS X-Ray, Azure Monitor, Grafana, Amazon CloudWatch and Prometheus. See our Datadog vs. Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) report.

    See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors, best Log Management vendors, and best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors.

    We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability 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.