Datadog Reviews

The main use cases are to provide visibility to costs for each product in the company as well as to consolidate all the observability in one tool. We are moving the team from being an operational team that needs to keep the tool up and running (applying patches and resolving problems) to a team that is focused on providing meaningful visibility of the systems, applications, and services of the company. We want to add value where the developers and the systems administrators are not able to focus.

The organization changed from having a team to operate different tools and providers to being a team worried about enabling and creating different dashboards, alerts, and automations in order to reduce downtime and increase the visibility of all the products, systems, and applications used. 

We moved from a full operation team to a team that adds value to IT, finance, product, back office, and any other team that requires correct information about the services provided while providing the possibility for them to create their own views and dashboards.

The tags are quite useful. They are providing the capability to give meaning to on-premises hardware (since it was not possible outside of cloud solutions and containers) as well to tag traces and logs. 

The full stack of integrations made it easier to monitor the different technologies and platform providers, including Software as a Service providers, that otherwise would need a lot of work and customization to be able to see what is happening. We'd also need to use several other separate tools that would require an increase in the required staff to operate them. Datadog gave us the opportunity to have a single platform for observability.

The product could be improved by providing remote control to agents, enabling them to execute automation and collections without requiring another automation tool or integration. 

Also, there is a lot of space for the FinOps discipline. For example, it could potentially provide better and richer information for the teams to check the costs and optimize the product.

I've used the solution for one year.

The stability is very good even though we have had some minor problems recently.

The scalability is very good. We've had no problems until now.

Technical support is good. That said, we had some cases that needed to be escalated to get to a faster resolution.

Positive

We previously used AppDynamics. The tool was not providing good system visibility as it was limited and had a very high cost.

The initial setup is somewhat complex. There is a need to create a new automation to install and deploy agents that needs to consider the required security for a financial company.

We handled the implementation in-house.

The ROI is still being calculated.

Users need to be aware of licensing control. With autodiscovery, the product can begin to come at a high cost.

We also looked into Splunk, ELK, and Dynatrace.

We use the solution for monitoring our logs across distributed clusters. Right now, we have an Elasticsearch solution that is tied to each platform (our product is a PaaS solution). 

We are looking at moving to a single pane of glass solution, which Datadog would be good for (plus, we could wrap up other tools like Prometheus, Grafana, Pagerduty, Pingdom, and more). We want to be able to have Datadog running on one single cluster and ingesting and processing logs from all our distributed clusters.

So far, we are just in the evaluation stages so it's hard to say how it's improved out organization. However, one positive impact it had is it's been just showing us an example of how to build in observability, metrics, tracing, etc., in a better way. 

Even if we don't end up using Datadog, it revealed problems and optimizations to us that weren't obvious before. One potential reason why it may not help us is that we have strict rules around log parsing and may not be able to send it to an external organizaton for ingestion/processing.

The CPU profiler has been interesting even though it isn't our core use case. 

We are finding that Datadog has way more offerings than originally expected, so we are constantly finding new parts of it that would be convincing to use. 

The log and ingestion are very similar to our current Elasticsearch setup. We find the tracing and overall integration/ecosystem to be the most valuable part. Basically, the CPU profiler is a good example of a value add for a problem we knew we had yet was low priority and had hacky workarounds. The value proposition is in the ecosystem as a whole.

The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming. 

The solution requires better overarching UI, which would make things clearer. Even though I generally dislike the AWS UI, it makes the different services very clear, and it also makes where you are at any given point clear. 

The sidebar for all the different services is a bit much. 

I also found the tagging of logging pipelines to be a bit tedious. It would be great if, once marked up, it would automatically be a first-class citizen in Datadog.

We are still in the evaluation stage and have used it less than one month.

The stability looks good so far.

It seems easier to scale and build app functionality across multiple teams rather than other solutions.

We have used Elasticsearch, Grafana, and Prometheus. We are still evaluating Datadog.

The product has provided good ROI by saving development time as well as time managing setting up ES.

It is somewhat expensive compared to open-source options.

We evaluated Elasticsearch, Grafana, and Prometheus. We are still evaluating Datadog.

We use different tools for log collection and monitoring. Using Datadog will combine different use cases into one product that will be easier to manage. 

The tools we use are open-source, so there is no commercial support. Having customer support would be ideal since we're a small team. 

Profiling would be another great feature to have. Currently, it's manual. Having Datadog would give us a standard, and we don't have to do much manual work.

It will solve a lot of our problems. We have different tools for each of them in our organization; they are open-source and therefore not very well maintained with there is no customer support. 

Having an industry-standard product such as Datadog would be ideal for us as we are short on manpower. Since this is a managed all-in-one product with readily available support, we will be able to focus on application logic rather than figuring out why a tool isn't working.

The biggest thing I liked was the combination of all the things - monitoring, log aggregation, and profiling. We have different tools for each of them in our organization and all of them are open-source. These are not very well maintained and there is no customer support. 

Having an industry-standard product is ideal for us as we are short on manpower. Profiling is another amazing feature. Currently, we rely on some open-source solutions, and it's all done locally. Having it done on Kubernetes would give us more insights and help with performance. Alerting is again a nightmare for us. Datadog solves all of these issues.

It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features. The UI could certainly be improved. Having less information with better organization could help newcomers. I haven't seen the documentation, however, a well-organized documentation would invite many varied users.

I've been using the solution for three years.

We use it mostly for logging log messages from our Kubernetes and EC2 instances, for example, system messages and errors. Also, we want log messages from our firewalls and other network infrastructure in case of network issues. We intend to use it for application logging, et cetera, to get insight into internal problems in the applications in Kubernetes pods. We want to use it for monitoring in case of system problems and hardware failures so that it can notify us.

It's good to have a single location for all the logs. If you have logs coming from a whole lot of sources, it makes it hard to find where the problem lies. 

We had to spend a lot of time logging into various systems and pursuing a billion different log files looking for something that stands out as a possible cause of the issue. That can take a lot of time and doesn't give much visibility into the possible interactions between systems.

Datadog has a lot of features to be able to drill down deep into the swath of logs that our platforms generate. 

It has a lot of ability to make fancy and deep searches using regular expressions and to graph them into useful and interesting dashboard graphs. 

The plethora of built-in/downloadable integrations make it much easier to set up for our platforms. Otherwise, we'd have to parse the log files ourselves, which would take a great deal of effort. Had to do it before when had to use an ELK stack for logging, which was painful.

Some of the interface is still confusing to use. It has many features, and it takes a lot of effort to figure out what they all mean. Maybe having tooltips or something would be helpful. Also, some of the integrations are better than others.

I've used the solution for a month.

The solution seems very stable.

Have used an ELK stack before. However, it took a lot of effort to maintain, and parsing the logs was difficult.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We are using Datadog for server metrics, log aggregation and searching, system monitoring, alerting the team about errors, and dashboards for our developers. It's used by the Site Reliability Engineering team and Management of all levels. 

It's assisting us in proving SOC II compliance. 

We're looking to improve our usage of Datadog's RUM and APM components to get better and more performance insights on our production environments. 

We're also looking to leverage more synthetic monitors and runbooks for anyone responding to incidents.

The ability to easily drill down into log queries quickly and efficiently has helped us to resolve several critical incidents so far this year, and we heavily rely on a series of dashboards showing us various queues and load on CPU and memory for servers. 

We also have a view of the information required when we begin the patch and/or upgrade processes. 

I've also set up several monitors to alert the Site Reliability Engineering team when various metrics show a server might be reaching capacity. We use it to send an email suggesting we increase the size of the cloud instance.

The ability to easily drill down into log queries quickly and efficiently has helped us to resolve several critical incidents. We heavily rely on dashboards that are showing us various queues and load on CPU and memory for servers. 

We also have a view of the information required when we begin the patch and/or upgrade processes. 

I've arranged several monitors to alert the Site Reliability Engineering team when various metrics show a server that might be reaching capacity. We use it to send an email suggesting we increase the size of the cloud instance.

Datadog could always lower the price! In general, more demos online and maybe more free hands-on tutorials for basic functionality would be good for less technical users. 

I would also prefer more chances to amend the contract more than twice a year. As a smaller but growing company, it can be difficult to adequately predict demand.

I've used the solution for more than three years.

We use Datadog for general observability into our infrastructure, as well as running analytics queries for our SLI/SLO platform. This helps all of our teams be informed of how well their products are actually performing in production, and aim their efforts at the thing that will provide the highest ROI. 

We also use it for general monitoring and alerting during load tests and service releases to detect any issues related to the deployments. This helps us maintain our high contractual uptime promises to our clients.

It has drastically reduced the amount of time we spend on debugging issues and tracking down the root causes of incidents. What might have taken days or hours with separate vendors in the past (or even single vendors with terrible UI) is now quick and easy. 

We've often gone from detecting an incident to identifying the needed fix within ten minutes or less and covered multiple domains like APM, Logs, Database performance monitoring, etc., in just a few clicks. This is extremely powerful.

Distributed tracing is the most valuable feature. We have hundreds of microservices, and knowing how top-level requests weave throughout all of them is invaluable. 

At one glance, we can clearly see which service is slow and then switch over to the infrastructure view or container view to debug why the slowness is happening. This is true of all their other integrated products as well; the more you add, the more insights you get when looking at traces.

We also use RUM extensively. This helps us cover the last mile of application performance. Without it, we wouldn't know if our browser applications were functioning slowly for our users.

There is occasional UI slowness and bugs. While the Datadog UI is generally miles above its competitors, there are a few cases where it falls short or has started to slow down over time. They also occasionally make poor UI redesign choices. They should continue focusing on this area to maintain the high standard they started out with.

I've used the solution for five years.

We've never had major stability issues.

Scalability has never been an issue, although there is occasionally UI slowness.

Support via tickets is absolutely terrible. It's the one obvious bad spot for Datadog. If we didn't have direct relationships with many of their product managers, our experience would be much worse.

Negative

We previously used New Relic. It had a terrible UI and the integration between products was not great. Datadog is miles ahead of them and is continuing to increase that distance.

The initial setup is straightforward, and the docs are done well.

We managed the implementation in-house.

Our ROI is high.

I'd advise users to negotiate rates. Datadog's off-the-shelf rates are pretty high.

We have only used and looked into New Relic.

We use an enterprise version of a CMS platform which is enabling businesses to transmit content to their customers. The tool is fully customizable to the end user, including out-of-the-box integrations as well as APIs for custom plugin support. 

Our systems fully manage content using AWS as the back-end cloud provider. Assets are kept in secure buckets and utilize the Kubernetes infrastructure to deliver our product to end users and internal authors. Using the CMS allows for business people to manage content without needing development efforts.

This tool is the sole purpose of my company and the solutions we provide around it. Enabling customers to manage their content in a fast, reliable, and highly user-friendly setup has been critical to our success. 

Offering our product at SaaS, PaaS, cloud, and on-prem editions has enabled us to provide a solution for all types of customers. 

The platform appeals to companies spanning many industries on a global scale. 

Being based in SUI allows us to secure both the EU and other companies more easily.

The enterprise version of a CMS platform enables businesses to transmit content to their customers. 

The tool is fully customizable to the end user, including out-of-the-box integrations as well as APIs for custom plugin support. 

The content is fully managed within our systems using AWS as the back-end cloud provider. Assets are kept in secure buckets, and we can utilize the Kubernetes infrastructure to deliver our product to end users and internal authors. 

Using the CMS allows for business people to manage content without needing development efforts. Allowing this type of setup for business users has been a key reason for our success.

There is always room for improvement when dealing with cloud-based technologies. Mainly, I would say, it's just increasing our offerings to attract various other types of industries and businesses across more fields. 

New features as requested by our existing customers will help make the product better.

The product was self-developed.

We use a SaaS deployment. 

We use Datadog for application logs, error tracking, performance tracking, alerting, and overall production state surveillance. 

It helps us improve observability and ease of maintenance through better information for our support teams and their issue qualification. 

We also use dashboards to keep all the information at ready and easy to access. SLOs notably for our uptimes but also our feature usage. It also feeds our alerting for our on-call SREs into PagerDuty by launching alerts when specific parameters are exceeded.

Our usage of Datadog has allowed us to improve our observability at great lengths. We have been able to track pain points more easily with it, and be able to define custom metrics to track our user's usage of the features we roll out.

Being able to generate dashboards has given higher management a better view of our teams' work and has allowed for better client information by our sales team as they have a more transparent way ofdealing with our upcoming features.

Dashboards and their versatility are among the most valuable features. They allow us to have internal facing trackers of our application's issues, usages, and features. They also allow us to have a better understanding of how users react to new features, and to display more information to other teams or also clients through uptime SLOs, et cetera.

We also found the Synthetics Tests and especially the Browser Tests very helpful. It is a nicer way to create end-to-end tests in a more user-friendly way than through code. They are very valuable in saving time compared to code-based testing.

Documentation is also very clear and interesting.

We would like to see some versioning system for the Synthetic Tests so that we could have a backup of our tests since they are time-consuming to make and very easy to damage in a moment of error.

I look forward to seeing the next features that will be released.

I have been using the product for a year and a half. The company has been using it for longer. I don't know the exact details.

We have yet to have a large-scale problem with stability using Datadog. It's very satisfying.

The scalability is very good.

I've had only a few experiences with customer support, and it went well. They were fast!

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously.

I wasn't there for the initial setup.

I wasn't there for the initial setup.

I cna't speak to the ROI.

I don't give advice regarding that.

I wasn't part of the decision-making process.

It would be nicer if the pricing information was easier to find in the documentation. Sometimes it helps to get an overall idea of the cost of certain options.