Security Engineering Manager at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
Real User
Democratizes observability, great log searchability, and intuitive UI
Pros and Cons
  • "I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices."
  • "One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line. I had really wanted to have team-level visibility for findings, since the team managing the resources has much more context and ability to resolve the issue, as the service owner. However, this has been added to the announcement in a recent keynote."

What is our primary use case?

I use the solution to manage security-related logs and metrics, as well as create detection rules for security events. I am a security engineer, so one area of interest is the CSPM product, giving us the ability to look at findings across the cloud environment. 

The great part about the Datadog security products is that they incorporate the context of the resources/hosts where the security event is found. This allows us to see exactly what is running on a host that we see as a security alert.

How has it helped my organization?

The greatest impact it has had is on the ability to democratize observability and put monitoring into the hands of the people. Teams can quickly get the information they need, without needing a bunch of training, since the UI is super intuitive and easy for beginners. This helps reduce time to resolution during incidents and gives context to developers quickly and easily. Context is really important since seconds matter when the ship is down, and you don't know why.

What is most valuable?

I find the greatest feature is being able to search across logs from various microservices. As a member of the security team, I find that I often need visibility into other teams' services in order to get a good picture of our security posture.

I also am a fan of the ability to easily create monitors and get alerts into Slack quickly, without too much overhead. For example, I often need to create monitors where I am not too sure where the baseline lies. Having the ability to create anomaly monitors makes this process much more straightforward. Anomaly monitors are great for a security team.

What needs improvement?

One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line. I had really wanted to have team-level visibility for findings, since the team managing the resources has much more context and ability to resolve the issue, as the service owner. However, this has been added to the announcement in a recent keynote. 

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Datadog
April 2024
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For how long have I used the solution?

Personally, I've used it my entire time employed here, more than three years.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Plinio Moreira - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Engineer at Delfia
Real User
Great Logging, APM, and RUM capabilities
Pros and Cons
  • "The CCM, Workflows, Logs, APM, and RUM are all useful aspects of the solution."
  • "We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved."

What is our primary use case?

I'm a Datadog partner in Brazil, and I monitor all my applications with Datadog too. I would like to enable all features in my DPN portal and get access to custom demos. We resell Datadog and a full stack of pre-sales, sales, and post-sales services. We have customers for all sectors, including governmental, financial services, services in general, telecom, et cetera. Today, we are the biggest Datadog partner in Brazil, and we are searching for an expansion in our MSP environment.

How has it helped my organization?

I resell all solutions in Datadog, so all features are important for our customers.
We are the biggest Datadog partner in Brazil, and we would like to expand our MSP environment.

What is most valuable?

The CCM, Workflows, Logs, APM, and RUM are all useful aspects of the solution. I resell all solutions in Datadog, so all features are important.

I'm a Datadog partner in Brazil, and I monitor all my applications with Datadog too. 

The solution works within all sectors, including, governmental, financial services, services in general, and telecom. 

What needs improvement?

We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved. In general, cloud users and microservices users like Kubernetes offer a faster improvement in the environment. Our users of the feature logs had a lot of benefits and found cost reductions also.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for three years. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We used to use AppDynamics. We switched due to the fact that the cloud monitoring and K8 monitoring are not as good as Datadog.

What about the implementation team?

I'm a reseller.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing model is better, however, if they had the option to block consumption in the Infra and APM, that would help to keep better control of costs.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We did not evaluate other solutions.

What other advice do I have?

We use the solution as a SaaS.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Datadog
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Datadog. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Director of Software Engineering at Code Climate
Vendor
Helpful dashboards, useful data-driven decision-making and good integration with PagerDuty
Pros and Cons
  • "We integrate our application logs. It is great to be able to tie our metrics and our traces together."
  • "The pricing should be less of a surprise."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for charting application metrics.

We use it for all our application metrics, host metrics, and monitors with a PagerDuty integration. 

We integrate our application logs. It is great to be able to tie our metrics and our traces together.

We use the APM module with traces. It is great to be able to link APM, logs, and metrics in one go, as it shortens our troubleshooting and RCA dramatically.

We are loving the tool; it is great to have all those insights in one place. 

We hope that they keep making my life and our engineers' life easier.

How has it helped my organization?

The solution improved our organization with:

  • Data-driven decision making
  • Dashboards we can share with our customer success team
  • Dashboards we can share with our sales engineers
  • Help during incidents
  • Help with preventing incidents
  • Integration with PagerDuty.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable aspects of the solution include:

  • The charting application metrics
  • help with the business, prioritization, software design, and infrastructure design.

What needs improvement?

The pricing model hurts and forces us to work around the tool sometimes.

On top of application performance metrics, it would be great to have host performance metrics, suggesting changes to better use a cluster like: "You are over-provisioning this host" or "based on historical data, you will need to scale up in X days."

Adding a module to extract data from Datadog so we can use the data in our own system would be helpful.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for six or more years.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We previously used New Relic, which was a great tool. That said, Datadog is a more complete solution.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing should be less of a surprise. They should allow us to cap costs which would lead to less frustration.

We need better documentation on the pricing.

It might be helpful if they added a pricing simulator.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Great centralized dashboards and telemetry capabilities with a helpful visualization of performance metrics
Pros and Cons
  • "Datadog has proven to be easy to set up and legible for both development and operational teams."
  • "If there were a more cost-effective manner of deploying the tool, we'd be more likely to adopt it more widely."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for centralized dashboarding and telemetry viewing for teams across the organization. 

We're focused on ensuring that both development teams and leadership can reasonably gain insights into the status of various systems. 

At the end of the day, managing various dashboards and metrics aggregators like Prometheus, Kubernetes server, AWS Cloudwatch, and Grafana have lead to some confusion, and we've had issues with teams not knowing where their data exists and where they can view their system metrics. 

Datadog has proven to be easy to set up and legible for both development and operational teams.

How has it helped my organization?

The solution has been useful in generally ensuring that teams are able to better visualize and think about their application's impact on data centers/cloud performance. Having centralized tooling for observability means that each team can be on the same page when discussing monitoring. 

There have been some issues where teams have been unable to find metrics within the tool properly and some behaviors with the tagging and grouping functionality that seem not to be as easy to understand as one may expect. That said, overall, the experience has been one that is positive.

What is most valuable?

The dashboards have proven most helpful in ensuring that teams can track the performance of their apps. On a more practical scale, the alerts have proved invaluable for triaging and bringing services back online.

Being able to tie the alerts generated through Datadog monitors has allowed us to quickly and effectively respond to infrastructure and software issues that would have otherwise hamstrung the organization and prevented us from accomplishing our day-to-day tasks. This is naturally invaluable.

What needs improvement?

I'm sure that this is said all the time, however, the pricing model has led us to restrict the usage of the service. If there were a more cost-effective manner of deploying the tool, we'd be more likely to adopt it more widely. 

Aside from the cost, the nature of the tagging and grouping features within the monitoring dashboards have often caused headaches when creating new dashboards for aggregate services and infrastructure stacks. It would be nice to ensure that this feature is supported long-term and brought with easier accessibility.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for three years.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Datadog is easy to use and generally looks great from a customer standpoint. The ability to export metrics all into a central location was crucial.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Datadog is very expensive for smaller organizations. The pricing model might be restrictive until the organization reaches a certain size.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Primarily we did an evaluation of other providers, such as AWS and GCP, outside of in-house solutions.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Intuitive with high availability and good integrations
Pros and Cons
  • "The network map is crucial in identifying bottlenecks and determining what needs more attention."
  • "To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."

What is our primary use case?

We are using the solution for scaling up the website for market data applications. EC2 and Datadog have enabled high-level monitoring of underlying infra and services.

The Datadog profiler comes in handy to pinpoint issues with resource utilization during peak hours, and traces/log management helps narrow down the root cause.

The network map is crucial in identifying bottlenecks and determining what needs more attention.

Host map helps identify problematic hardware and devise ways to counter issues that arise during scaling, and deploying solutions on the cloud.

How has it helped my organization?

While my team is relatively new to Datadog, I already see immense value in switching over to Datadog as the primary APM and NPM tool.

The arsenal of features it offers is bound to come in a clutch when facing production issues, and when finding out what went wrong is crucial.

The network map has helped to figure out the golden signals and optimize the infrastructure.

The synthetics have helped ensure the high availability of arch functions as intended.

What is most valuable?

The network map is useful. With it, we have the ability to see the data flow across the entire network path across all the applications is highly valuable as the data from this service helps identify network bottlenecks, non-performant applications, and bad endpoints.

This is especially crucial for a high-availability website aimed at market data applications where low latency is crucial.

The host map gives a clear picture of the entire infrastructure, and the ability to switch between logs, metrics, and traces is very handy when it comes to debugging issues on the fly.

I love the ability to install the integrations and agents quickly. This is a well-made product.

What needs improvement?

To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements.

My involvement with Datadog has largely been positive. I love the simplicity and intuitiveness it offers - even for nontechnical folks who just might be starting out with developing technical chops in their domain.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for three years.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Associate at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Great for debugging with good UI and helpful filtering capabilities
Pros and Cons
  • "It is easy to navigate the menu and create tests."
  • "This service could be less costly."

What is our primary use case?

We use the product for recording loggers on our various services across different teams. For example, we use logs to keep track of info logs for events and error logs to catch exceptions. 

When users ask us to investigate a situation, we use logs to keep track of events and where the user's code traveled to. We also use synthetic testing and monitoring features to keep track of our many alerts in the production and QA environments.

How has it helped my organization?

We use Datadog mainly for debugging purposes. For example, we use it to navigate where the code trace is when an issue arises due to its ability to search through the logs. 

We also use it to address user queries. Sometimes users would ask us a certain question concerning our codebase, we use Datadog to track the code stack and also use time monitoring to get an idea of the time frame around when the use case happened.

What is most valuable?

The feature I have found to be the most valuable is the filtering feature in logs. It is really easy to type plus and minus to filter out different logs. I use it to navigate the noise. 

I use synthetic tests as well. It is easy to navigate the menu and create tests. 

Much of the UI is very straightforward, and I do appreciate the ability to search for any documentation on the various features when I need to as well. The DASH monitoring boards are nice to give an overview of various performances and allow us to track use cases.

What needs improvement?

This service could be less costly. Right now, we only keep 15 days worth of logs since we want to be more economical in terms of cost. It would be nice if I had the option to monitor logs beyond 15 days. For APM traces, we only keep a year worth of traces. The UI can be a little more straightforward as well. I found it to have too many options.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is good.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is good.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Software Developer at a pharma/biotech company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Top 10
Great for logging and monitoring with useful RUM capabilities
Pros and Cons
  • "The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
  • "Even though it is powerful on its own, the UI-based design lacks elegance, efficiency, and complexity."

What is our primary use case?

We’re currently using logging, monitoring, metrics, APM, etc.

We've started to use e-SLOs, however, it takes a bit of time to work through those.

RUM has been very useful. I have used this in the past to debug problems in production, which has been g great.

We also want to start using synthetics and tracing more. 

Our application currently runs in many different environments based on our customers' requirements. This allows us to see everything in one place and filter by environment as required, which is extremely useful.

How has it helped my organization?

The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc. We've gone from almost nothing to something that didn’t take a lot of time to set up. It has been great since we had so little time to spare.

As a startup, we have limited resources, and no one has enough time for anything. The fact that there are so many easy integrations and configurations by YAML makes everything easy to set up without needing a full-time employee. Instead, we're just configuring monitoring solutions which are very desirable.

What is most valuable?

The product is very useful for tracking down anything that’s gone wrong. I’ve been using it to make sure everything is working correctly after deployment and to make sure we don’t suffer performance degradation. We've found it great for tracking down anything that’s gone wrong in real-time.  

The logs are helpful. They are necessary for any application. Prior to this, our solution would have been to SSH into a machine and tail log files. This, however, is untenable for many reasons, and one of the first things I wanted to change.

The RUM has been great. Seeing real users interacting with our website is quite helpful.

What needs improvement?

Sometimes it’s difficult to customize certain queries to find specific things, specifically with the logging solution. I’ve used other logging platforms in the past that have extensive and mature query languages. This might not be super friendly to start out with, yet can be very powerful. 

I wish there was more of an emphasis on query languages instead of the UI-based tooling that Datadog provides. Even though it is powerful on its own, the UI-based design lacks the elegance, efficiency, and complexity.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for six months or so.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I was previously familiar with Splunk.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don’t handle pricing or licensing aspects. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I did not evaluate other options. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Product SRE at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
Real User
Good dashboards and documentation with helpful Synthetics Tests
Pros and Cons
  • "Dashboards and their versatility are among the most valuable features."
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The scalability is very good.

How are customer service and support?

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

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We did not use a different solution previously.

How was the initial setup?

I wasn't there for the initial setup.

What about the implementation team?

I wasn't there for the initial setup.

What was our ROI?

I cna't speak to the ROI.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I don't give advice regarding that.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Datadog Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: April 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Datadog Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.