AWS X-Ray vs Datadog comparison

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AWS X-Ray

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Datadog and AWS X-Ray compete in monitoring and tracing. Datadog leads in integration and visualization, whereas AWS X-Ray excels in AWS ecosystem integration, catering to AWS-reliant organizations.

Features: Datadog includes comprehensive monitoring, extensive integrations, and real-time alerts. It offers anomaly detection to identify performance issues swiftly. AWS X-Ray provides deep insights into application requests through AWS-hosted services, facilitating AWS-specific tracing capabilities. Datadog's broad integrations enable flexibility, whereas AWS X-Ray's focus is on AWS services.

Room for Improvement: Datadog can enhance its APM support for various programming languages and optimize its dashboard customization features for non-technical users. Additionally, it may improve cost-effectiveness for smaller operations. AWS X-Ray could expand tracing support for non-AWS services and improve interfaces to be more user-friendly for non-AWS environments. Enhanced alerts customization and reporting features would also be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Datadog offers streamlined onboarding with detailed documentation, making it easy to deploy across different environments. Its customer service provides robust support. AWS X-Ray’s tight AWS integration eases deployment for AWS users but might pose challenges elsewhere. Datadog offers broader flexibility, while AWS X-Ray simplifies deployment in AWS-specific infrastructure.

Pricing and ROI: Datadog's flexible pricing model may involve higher initial setup costs but offers strong ROI through customizable features. AWS X-Ray’s cost efficiency benefits AWS-focused organizations but requires careful consideration of AWS-related fees. Datadog’s ROI thrives on its versatility, while AWS X-Ray is cost-effective within AWS-centric companies.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS X-Ray vs. Datadog Report (Updated: March 2025).

AWS X-Ray vs. Datadog

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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

AWS X-Ray

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

19th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Datadog

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

188

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (2nd), Log Management (3rd), Container Monitoring (1st), Cloud Monitoring Software (1st), AIOps (1st), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of AWS X-Ray is 3.3%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Datadog is 8.8%, down from 11.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Willy Moura

Solutions Architect/ Analyst at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Identifying and resolving deployment issues while configuring can be challenging

I have two use cases with my customers. One involves using AWS Fargate, and the other involves an application running on WordPress. The WordPress application was very slow, and we used AWS X-Ray to understand the main problem. X-Ray helped us identify issues with our EFS, allowing us to adjust…

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Kevin Palmer

DevOps/Security Principal at Raken

Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation

Datadog provides us value in three major ways: First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance. Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit. Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most important one is compliance. We're able to achieve our regulatory levels. We're able to achieve the security level that we need for the federal government."

"The solution has made it easier for us to trace the problems that we have with our requests and to monitor the timing of each step in each request we do in our endpoints."

"AWS X-RAY identifies bottlenecks in terms of stability and performance and how long certain data lives in terms of response time and duration."

"The error analysis capabilities of X-Ray are really good."

"AWS X-Ray shows us exactly when there are delays, helping us understand the depth of issues and what is happening point-to-point."

"AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process."

"The most promising feature of AWS X-Ray is that you can debug the issues through the proper logs. You can also get an analysis out of the logs for some use cases, though I have yet to try all the features of AWS X-Ray."

More AWS X-Ray pros

"Our primary alerts, based on metrics and synthetic transactions, are the most used and relied upon for decreased MTTA/MTTR across all of our platforms. This is followed by deep log analysis that enables us to quickly and easily get to a preliminary root cause that someone on the infrastructure, platform or development teams can take and focus their attention on the precise target that Datadog revealed as the issue to be remediated."

"The dashboards and the performance of the software have been great."

"Each component complements the other, creating a cohesive system where data, logs, and metrics are seamlessly integrated."

"Datadog has clear dashboards and good documentation."

"Its logs are most valuable."

"The ability to create custom dashboards has been incredibly useful, allowing us to visualize key metrics and KPIs in a way that makes sense for different teams and stakeholders."

"Profiling has been made easier."

"The visibility that it provides is valuable. It is helping in being proactive around incident management. It is helping us to be able to get more visibility into our customers' applications so that we can assist them at the application layer. We also provide them the infrastructure from an AWS standpoint. We are able to make sure that our customers are aware of certain critical things around the analytical piece of either the network or the application. We're able to call customers before they even know about the issue. From there, we can start putting together some change management processes and help them a bit."

More Datadog pros

Cons

"Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially."

"The user interface is sometimes kind of confusing to understand. It's not very user-friendly."

"I do not have any notes in terms of improvements."

"They can improve how traces are sent to other providers."

"What needs to be better in AWS X-Ray is the log filtering. Predefined filters could be helpful because the power of analytics comes from how you can filter the data. I also want to see more KPIs from AWS X-Ray."

"Compared to other open-source tools, AWS X-Ray needs improvement in providing discounts."

"A significant downside is that it is very expensive."

"If you have a small team, it's probably overkill."

More AWS X-Ray cons

"It seems that admin cost control granularity is an afterthought."

"I spent longer than I should have figuring out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables."

"The pricing should be less of a surprise."

"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."

"Ingesting data from various sources to monitor the log metrics of the system can always improve so that, if something goes wrong, the right teams are alerted."

"While the tool is robust with many different capabilities, users would greatly benefit from more examples in the documentation."

"We need more advanced querying against logs."

"Datadog lacks a deeper application-level insight. Their competitors had eclipsed them in offering ET functionality that was important to us. That's why we stopped using it and switched to New Relic. Datadog's price is also high."

More Datadog cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for AWS X-Ray is a six out of ten."

"The solution is a bit expensive."

"As you develop a relationship with Amazon, your pricing gets lower. You get credits for the amount of the system you use, and then if you're the government, you can get government pricing. For commercial users, there's a hump when you go from small to medium to big enterprise. Small businesses can live pretty easily off the free tier in a lot of cases, but when you go from a medium to a big enterprise, it becomes more expensive on a per-user basis. I'd like to see that curve going in a different way where pricing can be driven down while people are trying to adopt the technology."

"Pricing seemed easy until the bill came in and some things were not accounted for."

"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."

"The price is better than some competing products."

"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."

"This solution is budget friendly."

"Licensing is based on the retention period of logs and metrics."

"The cost is high and this can be justified if the scale of the environment is big."

"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."

More Datadog pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

18%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

37%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS X-Ray?

AWS X-Ray is a strong solution and has a smooth integration process.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS X-Ray?

Compared to other open-source tools, AWS X-Ray needs improvement in providing discounts. Customers often seek cheaper solutions. When using many AWS resources, pricing can be a mid-range cost, give...

What needs improvement with AWS X-Ray?

Sometimes, the collector agents are confusing to configure initially. It requires research to understand the correct configurations, especially when deploying on-premises or on an EC2 instance. Usi...

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 ...

Azure Monitor vs AWS X-Ray

Comparisons

Sentry vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 17% of the time

Compared 11% of the time

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 11% of the time

New Relic vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 10% of the time

Grafana vs AWS X-Ray

Compared 8% of the time

More AWS X-Ray Competitors

Dynatrace vs Datadog

Compared 13% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Datadog

Compared 12% of the time

New Relic vs Datadog

Compared 5% of the time

Splunk Enterprise Security vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

Amazon OpenSearch Service vs Datadog

Compared 4% of the time

More Datadog Competitors

Product Reports

AWS X-Ray

Download AWS X-Ray product report

Download Datadog product report

Overview

AWS X-Ray is a powerful debugging and performance analysis tool offered by Amazon Web Services. It allows developers to trace requests made to their applications and identify bottlenecks and issues.

With X-Ray, developers can visualize the entire request flow and pinpoint the exact location where errors occur. It provides detailed insights into the performance of individual components and helps optimize the overall application performance.

X-Ray integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, making it easy to trace requests across different services and identify dependencies. It also offers a comprehensive set of APIs and SDKs, enabling developers to instrument their applications and capture valuable data for analysis. With its user-friendly interface and powerful features, AWS X-Ray is a valuable tool for developers looking to improve the performance and reliability of their applications.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Datadog is a comprehensive cloud monitoring platform designed to track performance, availability, and log aggregation for cloud resources like AWS, ECS, and Kubernetes. It offers robust tools for creating dashboards, observing user behavior, alerting, telemetry, security monitoring, and synthetic testing.

Datadog supports full observability across cloud providers and environments, enabling troubleshooting, error detection, and performance analysis to maintain system reliability. It offers detailed visualization of servers, integrates seamlessly with cloud providers like AWS, and provides powerful out-of-the-box dashboards and log analytics. Despite its strengths, users often note the need for better integration with other solutions and improved application-level insights. Common challenges include a complex pricing model, setup difficulties, and navigation issues. Users frequently mention the need for clearer documentation, faster loading times, enhanced error traceability, and better log management.

What are the key features of Datadog?

Graphs and Dashboards: Visualizes servers and infrastructure with customizable views.
Metrics: Offers deep insights into system performance and user behavior.
Log Management: Provides powerful analytics for logs and seamless log aggregation.
Unified Tagging: Facilitates organization and retrieval of metrics and logs.
APM and RUM: Enables application performance monitoring and real user monitoring for comprehensive insights.
Synthetic Testing: Allows the simulation of user interactions to test application performance.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

System Reliability: Helps ensure uptime and performance across cloud environments.
Proactive Issue Resolution: Assists in identifying and resolving issues before they impact users.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines monitoring and log management tasks.
Flexible Integrations: Adapts to various cloud services and infrastructure setups.
Real-Time Alerts: Provides timely notifications to address problems swiftly.

Datadog is implemented across different industries, from tech companies monitoring cloud applications to finance sectors ensuring transactional systems' performance. E-commerce platforms use Datadog to track and visualize user behavior and system health, while healthcare organizations utilize it for maintaining secure, compliant environments. Every implementation assists teams in customizing monitoring solutions specific to their industry's requirements.

Sample Customers

COMCAST, ConnectWise, skyscanner, AirAsia, cookpad, cimpress, VTEX, zowdow

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

AWS X-Ray vs. Datadog