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Datadog vs Groundcover Observability Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Datadog
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
1st
Ranking in Log Management
4th
Ranking in AI Observability
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
211
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (4th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Container Monitoring (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (5th)
Groundcover Observability P...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
49th
Ranking in Log Management
41st
Ranking in AI Observability
25th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Datadog is 4.6%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Groundcover Observability Platform is 0.3%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Datadog4.6%
Groundcover Observability Platform0.3%
Other95.1%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Dhroov Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer at Grainger
Has improved incident response with better root cause visibility and supports flexible on-call scheduling
Datadog needs to introduce more hard limits to cost. If we see a huge log spike, administrators should have more control over what happens to save costs. If a service starts logging extensively, I want the ability to automatically direct that log into the cheapest log bucket. This should be the case with many offerings. If we're seeing too much APM, we need to be aware of it and able to stop it rather than having administrators reach out to specific teams. Datadog has become significantly slower over the last year. They could improve performance at the risk of slowing down feature work. More resources need to go into Fleet Automation because we face many problems with things such as the Ansible role to install Datadog in non-containerized hosts. We mainly want to see performance improvements, less time spent looking at costs, the ability to trust that costs will stay reasonable, and an easier way to manage our agents. It is such a powerful tool with much potential on the horizon, but cost control, performance, and agent management need improvement. The main issues are with the administrative side rather than the actual application.
Amir Baum - PeerSpot reviewer
Full Stack Developer at Augury Inc.
Monitoring microservices has become streamlined and custom dashboards provide clear bug insights
I cannot think of something specific regarding improvements for Groundcover Observability Platform as it is quite effective, especially compared to my previous experience with a Rapid7 platform, which was considerably worse. I think it would be beneficial to see the body and content of API calls in the traces as a possible improvement.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product has created a paradigm shift in how we deploy monitoring."
"The monitoring functionality, in general, and tagging infrastructure are great."
"The installation step is pretty straightforward."
"Real user monitoring has made triaging any possible bugs our users might face a lot easier."
"We have been able to be a more confident, knowledgeable, and capable team when everything is being ported into a centralized format."
"Because of our client focus, it is easy for us to sell. This is because it is easy to use and easy to set up."
"Our usage of Datadog has allowed us to improve our observability at great lengths."
"It lets us react more quickly to things going wrong. Whereas before, it might have been 30 minutes to an hour before we noticed something going on, we will know within a minute or two if something is off, which will let us essentially get something back up and running faster for our customers, which is revenue."
"We switched to Groundcover Observability Platform primarily because of the difficult query syntax in our previous solution, and we chose Groundcover for their business model as they don't charge based on log storage, they provide the infrastructure, and from a security perspective, the data stays in-house, which wasn't the case with our previous tool."
"Groundcover Observability Platform scales effectively with our organization's growth as we add new environments and everything works great, and the migration from our old product went very smoothly, allowing us to deprecate it rather quickly."
"Groundcover Observability Platform has impacted my organization positively as it is the primary way we use observability in our company, so it has a significant impact."
 

Cons

"Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis. It's quite expensive."
"We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved."
"Since the Datadog platform has so many separate features, solving so many use cases, there are often inconsistencies in feature availability and interoperability between products."
"When the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us."
"In terms of UI, everything is very small, which makes it quite difficult to navigate at times."
"If there were a more cost-effective manner of deploying the tool, we'd be more likely to adopt it more widely."
"Some of the interface is still confusing to use."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
"I think it would be beneficial to see the body and content of API calls in the traces as a possible improvement."
"I would assess the stability and reliability of Groundcover Observability Platform as an eight out of ten; while I haven't experienced issues personally, I am aware they occasionally encounter some challenges."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"My advice is to really keep an eye on your overage costs, as they can spiral really fast."
"This solution is budget friendly."
"The solution is fairly priced but history and log storage can get costly depending on your needs."
"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."
"If you do your homework, you'll find that if you're really concerned with cost, it's good."
"It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
5%
Construction Company
46%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business82
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise100
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What needs improvement with Groundcover Observability Platform?
I recently visited their booth and reported a bug, which they demonstrated and logged. They assured me it would be fixed by tomorrow.Regarding future versions of Groundcover Observability Platform,...
What is your primary use case for Groundcover Observability Platform?
My main use cases for Groundcover Observability Platform ( /products/groundcover-observability-platform-reviews ) are as a monitoring tool for debugging and monitoring. I use it to review logs, che...
What advice do you have for others considering Groundcover Observability Platform?
These issues with Groundcover Observability Platform are quick to fix. We have an SRE person at the company who works with them closely and uses Groundcover constantly. He creates amazing graphs, m...
 

Overview

 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: May 2026.
900,051 professionals have used our research since 2012.