Datadog Reviews

We are a solution provider and Datadog is one of the products that I was working on with one of my clients. They are currently evaluating it for use in cloud monitoring.

Specifically, Datadog is used for monitoring cloud applications in terms of performance. The logs come into this solution from AWS and it provides dashboards for various environments.

The most valuable features are the graphs, dashboards, metrics, and the interface.

Additional metrics should be included.

Better integration with other solutions is needed.

I used Datadog in a project that lasted between one and two years. 

In terms of stability, I have not seen any issues and don't have any complaints.

Datadog is easy to scale.

We have not contacted technical support.

The initial setup was okay. I was not part of the implementation team but from my understanding, it was not complex.

Our in-house team handled the deployment.

My client is currently evaluating several monitoring tools including Datadog, Dynatrace, and AppDynamics. Compared to Dynatrace, Datadog has some room for improvement.

This is definitely a good product and I would consider them one of the leaders within the application monitoring and cloud monitoring space. My advice to anybody who is researching this solution is to consider it within the top three. That said, there are some features and metrics that are available in other products, such as Dynatrace, that are not available in Datadog.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am using the solution for monitoring metrics, logs, traces, etc. It's mainly for making dashboards as well as monitoring our services. 

We also use Datadog to help centralize our incident management to show the logs, where issues spiked, and some metrics. 

We use Datadog to do troubleshooting in Kubernetes, specifically in our Azure Kubernetes service. Beyond that, we are looking to use open telemetry in tandem with Datadog to further our log-tracing efforts. In the future, this may be expanded.

This solution improves our organization as now we have higher visibility into our application that we otherwise would not have. 

Since the Datadog agent comes in three forms, agentless, scraping, and through the API, it is very flexible. It is this flexibility in how to report our logs that keeps our logs centralized and organized. 

One major drawback of Datadog is the cost. Sometimes we set up flows in place to monitor resources that end up logging more than we thought, and the bill is too high.

Dashboards have been marrying the most valuable parts of Datadog. Dashboards use metrics that are very helpful for monitoring services. I recently used metrics to monitor the number of pods in Kubernetes, the spikes in requests in Kubernetes, and overall CPU and memory usage in our Kubernetes clusters. 

We can also use log analytics to further our understanding. We can handle debugging and find out why things are breaking in our applications. 

The log portion of Datadog has robust features to debug the applications we are running. I really appreciate the ability to use facets to par down the logs.

The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users. The documentation is way too much text and has no real information just to help get people started. Sometimes it doesn't help to read an entire essay just to get a grasp on how the logs or metrics work.

I've used the solution for two years.

Our use case is mainly deploying into our applications for monitoring/logging observability. We currently have our microservices feed into an actuator that exists in each instance of our application that extends to a local and central Grafana for client and internal visibility. The application we use is Grafana.

Logging captures application and system logs that are ported to each application instance for querying.

Whenever anything occurs that is considered unhealthy from a range of health checks, we have notification rules configured internally and externally for a prompt response time.

We have been able to be a more confident, knowledgeable, and capable team when everything is being ported into a centralized format. Beforehand, knowledge was isolated to individuals. Knowledge in terms of what information represented and where it was led to a lack of confidence. By having everything in one place, rules out that confusion and allows us to respond better to issues.

It also allows for personal growth as our team is learning the application from the ground up, and each person is enhancing their own skills.

The valuable features include the following: 

• We are currently utilizing a decentralized distributed framework for our deployment, including our monitoring/logging observability capabilities. Centralizing them, if contingent on our company privacy guidelines, will be a big help in tracking and responding to issues that come up and have the means to understand the origin of the log management tools that were demonstrated.
• The ability to fiddle around and manipulate how logs are outputted.
• The ability to track AWS Lambda functions, Cloudformation, and Cloudwatch allow someone that is not savvy to dip their toe into understanding their own product.
• The integration into AWS is key as well as our software is currently bound to AWS.

The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved. It was a bit overwhelming trying to figure out what is the best solution. It led to many prototypes or time spent just perusing documentation. If we were able to select bundles or template use cases, we would hit the ground running quicker.

I've used the solution for one year.

We use metrics to track the metrics of our application. We use logging to log any errors or erroneous application behavior as well as successful behavior. We use events to log successful steps in our pipeline or failed steps in our deployment. We use a combination of all these features to diagnose bugs. 

It makes it much more efficient to look at all the data in one place. This speeds up our development speed so that we can be agile.

This spectrum of solutions has allowed us to track down bugs faster and more rapidly, which allows us to limit revenue lost during downtime. 

It also allows us to accurately record and project current and future revenue by measuring the application's metrics. This way, my team can accurately and rapidly create reports for upper management that are easy to read and understand. 

Datadog is also easy to read by non-technical personnel. This way, if there are any erroneous readings, everybody has a chance to find them.

We use metrics to track the metrics of our application. We use logging to log any errors or erroneous application behavior as well as successful behavior. We use events to log successful steps in our pipeline or failed steps in our deployment. 

We use a combination of all these features to diagnose bugs. It makes it much more efficient to look at all the data in one place. This speeds up our development speed so that we can be agile.

These features are the features that I use the most since it is incredibly difficult to track down intermittent bugs if I were to look directly under the hood in a CLI.

Datadog could make their use cases more visible either through their docs or tutorial videos. There are different implementations of certain features that we utilize to customize Datadog functionality and in that way, we sometimes get results that are not conducive to what Datadog thinks their features' use cases are.

I've used the solution for at least one year.

We have only used Datadog. We did not previously use a different product.

One of the things we use it for is the same thing that we use FullStory for, which is to replay customer interactions with our platform. However, it also does the monitoring. It's like monitoring cloud tools. We're really mostly monitoring our own software to make sure that everything is functioning properly. We can check a bunch of things, and we can even play back customer sessions. It’s basically monitoring our application.

It really provides a lot of visibility in terms of how our software is working. If there are any problems, it surfaces them right away. We get alerts in Slack. It's really an essential tool for a company that provides software as a service.

I really like the replay, the ability to replay sessions, as I'm in sales engineering, so I sometimes need to know what my prospects are doing during a proof of value. I can actually see all the mouse moving and clicking on buttons and stuff like that. I can actually tell what they've been doing. There’s a lot of the other monitoring stuff as well. The development team uses it for monitoring and finds it very helpful.

It’s been kind of in the middle of many different things. The dashboards and the performance of the software have been great.

I haven't really noticed anything that they could improve upon. Maybe they could add in some features to go both ways, to maybe make some configuration changes, etc. That's a little bit outside of what Datadog does, though. It's really very full-featured, so I don't really have any complaints.

I haven't really fully looked at the documentation as I know where I need to go and look at things. It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience. There are so many functions there that sometimes navigating your way around is a little bit hard. They have a really nice menu system. However, there's so much there. It's possible that I skipped a guided tour when I started.

It’s not intuitive to everyone. There are a lot of technical features.

I’ve been using the solution for the last five months. However, the company may have used it for a year and a half.

The solution has been stable and reliable.

We haven’t had a problem with scalability. It’s been good.

We have 25 to 30 users on it currently. Our entire organization is under 60 people. Although not everyone is on it, a lot of our staff are. The sales, engineering, and customer success teams are all on it.

We may increase usage. No doubt that will come naturally with time. We’re hiring more people, and likely new hires will use it.

I have not had occasion yet to reach out to support.

We’ve also been using FullStory.

I wasn’t part of the implementation. The one thing I will say is that when they added the functionality to review sessions, it made our use of another product, FullStory, almost obsolete. I'll have to see if we will continue using FullStory or if we can rely completely on Datadog.

I am a customer and end-user.

We’re on the most recent version and keep it updated.

I’d rate it nine out of ten. The user experience could be slightly better.

We are evaluating Datadog for observability and monitoring requirements that we have in our company. In our use case, our intention is to provide some kind of framework for multiple app teams to use the tool for our cyber ability and engineering practices.

They have a very good foundation in capturing metrics, logs, and traces. It's a very nice tool for that and it allows you to apply these monitoring tools in almost any technology.

Even if you have several layers, containers, EC2 instances, build machines or whatever you need in your infrastructure, Datadog can integrate with all of them across multiple cloud providers. It's a great product.

One of the improvement opportunities that we have identified in my project concerns how hard it is to manage an organizational structure when you have multiple things in one organization, and you want to provide some kind of isolation between them. At the same time, from the management perspective, you want to see an overall overview of what is happening in your business unit, or as a whole division. This is the kind of limitation we're facing.

I'm not sure what kind of features are in the roadmap right now, but I encourage the development of features for defining your organization, and allowing the visibility of what kind of metrics you can get. Those features would be really useful for us. 

I have been using Datadog for about six months.

It's a very scalable product. Right now we are using the SaaS version, so we don't need to worry about the infrastructure or whatever is needed for the platform it is running on. All the capturing of data is sent to the SaaS product and that can be as scaled as needed.

So far their support is pretty nice. They have established many meetings and training sessions, and they are supporting our requirements very well. I don't have any complaints with Datadog support.

While it is an expensive product, I would rate the pricing level at four out of five. 

Normally, the primary reason why people use these kind of tools is observability, but right from the beginning you have to understand what observability is, what it means for your company, and how the tool is going to help you to capture the proper metrics for making your applications observable.

We run the agent in AWS. 

It has empowered all our platform engineers with a very powerful and easy to use monitoring system. Most of our platform organization is now involved in monitoring. Previously, only a handful of platform engineers were involved, because Graphite and Sensu were so cumbersome to use.

It is incredibly easy to do common monitoring actions:

• Excellent autocomplete for everything in the UI.
• Using tags is very intuitive (in contrast to the cumbersome regex-like based querying in Graphite).
• Going from viewing a metric to creating a monitor alerting on a metric is very easy. This is very important as the easier it is to create monitors, the more monitors will be created by people. With Graphite and Sensu, the effort required to create and test a monitor was so great that we had only a handful of monitors. We now have over 300 monitors.

• It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors). 
• It would also be nice if we had more insight into our own usage of Datadog (agents and custom metrics). They provide a usage page which does help, but it is not in real-time. 
• It would be great if usage metrics were automatically created and we could create custom metrics, instead we ended up building some of our own stuff to track and alert on our own usage.

Very rarely. Maybe only once or twice that we noticed. It is very reliable. 

No.

It is excellent. The web app has a real-time support chat window in which a support engineer is chatting with you within a minute. That is the "right" way to do support. 

We previously ran Graphite and Sensu ourselves. By moving to Datadog, we did not need to manage our own monitoring infrastructure anymore. Graphite was somewhat complex to run.

Initial setup is easy. Install the agent and send it metrics. There are StatsD/Datadog libraries available for most languages.

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 is hard to say without looking at all of this.

We looked at several competitors at the time (Summer 2016). There did not seem to be any compelling alternatives. Once we did the PoC with Datadog, we loved it and decided to move forward.

Try it out and see if you like it.

We use the solution for testing all of our application's endpoints. It is making sure that they work on a consistent basis.

We enjoy the multistep API tests.

They need to implement template variables into the message response body. They could be injected in the subsequent calls. However, they fail to be able to use those variables anywhere in the alert body message that is sent out.

We've been using the solution for a year.

I've never thought about stability and have no insights.

I find we are getting tossed from engineer to engineer. It is not fun when you have an ongoing problem. That is something from the customer resolution team that needs to be addressed.

Positive

We previously used Selenium. I was forced to use it. However, Datadog was a way simpler solution to setting up browser and API tests quickly.

The solution is very straightforward since it has a good GUI.

The initial setup was handled in-house.

It is not my job to track the ROI.

I have no details about the pricing. 

We did not evaluate other solutions. 

The solution is a SaaS.