We are using a mixture of on-prem and cloud solutions to bridge the gap with healthcare entities in the service of providing patients with the medication they need to live healthy lives.
Since we're a heavily regulated company, a lot of our solutions grew from on-premises monoliths. However, as we scaled out, it became harder and harder to move forward with that architecture. Today, we're investing heavily in transforming our systems from monoliths into distributed systems.
With this change in mind, the ability for us to connect the dots using Datadog has been invaluable.
Staff Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Great distributed tracing and flame graphs for debugging with a relatively painless setup
Pros and Cons
- "We like the distributed tracing and flame graphs for debugging. This has been invaluable for us during periods of high traffic or red alert conditions."
- "Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
We have an API that serves as a critical aspect of our system for generating new requests for us to process in service of a patient. This service has many tentacles, and it was always hard to track down how issues from this API are affecting things downstream. Since we've added more instrumentation in this API, Datadog has changed our status from a reactive posture to a proactive one.
It has also served as a prime example to other applications on what the benefit of a well-instrumented system is for that application and other applications around it. Due to this, more and more people are using Datadog.
What is most valuable?
We like the distributed tracing and flame graphs for debugging. This has been invaluable for us during periods of high traffic or red alert conditions. It has also informed our developers on how our various systems are interconnected and the downstream effects of the problems we might encounter for certain services.
We're still working on getting widespread adoption of these products. Still, we're already seeing a shift in the developer's perspective from application-specific and starting to look at things from a more holistic systems perspective.
While this is not part of the question, this is relevant: Now that I've learned more about RUM, this will be something that we will heavily leverage moving forward to give us a whole complete view of our system from the front and back end perspective.
What needs improvement?
Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions. Currently, we use a combination of documentation and COPs to ensure that folks know how to leverage what we have in Datadog properly.
While the guides for Datadog go a long way, a way to customize the user experience from "advanced" to "novice" mode would go a long way.
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For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It has never failed us and therefore I consider it to be very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's magic. For the most part, we just installed the product and a lot of it just worked out of the box.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is excellent.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We have used Splunk, Sentry, and a suite of hand-made solutions. We switched since the Datadog solution was both comprehensive and cohesive. It was also easier to onboard people since the solution was well-documented and standardized.
How was the initial setup?
For the most part, it was really painless to set up.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented the solution in-house.
What was our ROI?
We're still early on in our transformation process. That said, we are gaining a lot of steam in terms of adoption. Both the engineering team and the product team are seeing tremendous value from this solution.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
What other advice do I have?
Adding more tooltips and links to documentation or how-tos within the application would really go a long way for those trying to get their feet wet with Datadog.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Engineer at a educational organization with 5,001-10,000 employees
I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring.
Pros and Cons
- "I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use."
- "Datadog needs more local Asia-Pacific support, and if they don't have a SaaS solution in Asia-Pacific, they should offer an on-prem version. I'm told that's not possible."
What is our primary use case?
Datadog is a SaaS solution we tried for URL and synthetic monitoring. You record a transaction going into a website and replay that transaction from various locations. Datadog is mainly used by the admin, but three or four other guys had access to the reports and notifications, so it's five altogether.
We probably tried no more than 8 percent of what Datadog can do. There are so many other bits and modules. I've only gone into about half of what APM can do in the Datadog stack.
How has it helped my organization?
We could detect outages on particular websites or problems in specific locations. If I had paid for the full solution, I'm sure I could get a lot of value out of Datadog.
What is most valuable?
I like the amount of tooling and the number of solutions they sold with their monitoring. Datadog was highly intuitive to use.
What needs improvement?
Datadog needs more local Asia-Pacific support, and if they don't have a SaaS solution in Asia-Pacific, they should offer an on-prem version. I'm told that's not possible.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Datadog for about two or three years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I was only using Datadog to monitor on a small scale.
How are customer service and support?
I'd rate Datadog support four out of 10. It was primarily an issue with support in the Asia-Pacific region. I sent them several emails, and they responded around three weeks later.
They said it went around the houses. Nobody knew who to respond to. That's not good enough. They should have at least told me they'd received the email. I used to work in support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were just trying Datadog, and we've switched temporarily to Site24x7. We're looking for one of the bigger ones. They've all given us proposals, whereas Datadog hasn't come forward with a proposal for what they could do.
I used Datadog because I already had a relationship with them at a previous company. However, that guy's moved on now, and I wanted to see how good they were.
How was the initial setup?
Setting up Datadog is pretty straightforward. I have a lot of experience doing that sort of thing. It took maybe a day and a half to deploy because I was picking externally facing websites.
I deployed it by myself. One person is enough for the small system we had. However, if we were moving forward, I'd recommend at least two or three people to manage it.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Datadog would've cost around $850 a month based on the loads we were doing, and you could estimate roughly what you would be paying monthly. I liked their pricing model. It was flexible, so you only paid for what you used. I rate Datadog pricing eight out of 10.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked at several URL and APM monitoring solutions like Site24x7 and Pingdom. They weren't big players like Dynatrace or any of the those that had already provided us a request for information.
What other advice do I have?
Even with our negative experiences, I'd still give Datadog an eight out of 10. Datadog is a complete solution with easy-to-use templates and excellent scalability. People should know exactly what they're going to configure before they try it out. The trial is brief. Don't start a trial until you know exactly what you're going to do.
You must be certain that you can meet any internal security requirements. If you're in the Asia-Pacific region, you might not be able to run something that's running abroad.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Buyer's Guide
Datadog
March 2026
Learn what your peers think about Datadog. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2026.
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Director at CBRE
Flexible, excellent support, and reliable
Pros and Cons
- "The most valuable features of Datadog are the flexibility and additional features when compared to other solutions, such as AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Some of the features include AI and ML capabilities and cloud and analysis monitoring"
- "Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing."
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features of Datadog are the flexibility and additional features when compared to other solutions, such as AppDynamics and Dynatrace. Some of the features include AI and ML capabilities and cloud and analysis monitoring
What needs improvement?
Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Datadog for approximately one year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Datadog is stable. We did not have a single outage.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I have found Datadog to be scalable.
We have approximately 2,000 users using the solution in my organization.
How are customer service and support?
The support from Datadog is excellent.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have previously used AppDynamics and Dynatrace.
How was the initial setup?
Datadog's initial setup is easy because they have helped us come up with the easiest way of instrumenting any of the features which need to be deployed. We worked on it with their engineers and we were able to happily do it. We have done approximately 60 application monitoring through Datadog since our deployment.
What about the implementation team?
We have a very tiny team of four members that do the maintenance of Datadog.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price of Datadog is reasonable. Other solutions are more expensive, such as AppDynamics.
What other advice do I have?
Datadog is far better than any other monitoring tool in introducing any of the new capabilities because they think before Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure before they introduce the concepts. Datadog is a good tool to have for monitoring your own infrastructure.
I rate Datadog a ten out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Software Engineer at Liberis Limited
Great for logging and racing but needs better customization
Pros and Cons
- "Real user monitoring has made triaging any possible bugs our users might face a lot easier."
- "They need to offer better/more customization on what logs we get and making tracing possible on Edge runtime logs is a real requirement."
What is our primary use case?
We're using the product for logging and monitoring of various services in production environments.
It excels at providing real-time observability across a wide range of metrics, logs, and traces, making it ideal for DevOps teams and enterprises managing complex environments.
The platform integrates seamlessly with our cloud services, but browser side logging is a little lagging.
Dashboards are very useful for quick insights, but can be time consuming to create, and the learning curve is steep. Documentation is vast, but not as detailed as I'd like.
How has it helped my organization?
The solution has made logging and tracing a lot easier, and the RUM sessions are something we did not have previously. Datadog’s real-time alerting and anomaly detection help reduce downtime by allowing us to identify and address performance issues quickly.
The platform’s intelligent alert system minimises noise, ensuring your team focuses on critical incidents. This results in faster Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR), improving service availability.
It consolidates monitoring for infrastructure, applications, logs, and security into a single platform. This enables us to view and analyse data across the entire stack in one place, reducing the time spent jumping between tools.
What is most valuable?
Real user monitoring has made triaging any possible bugs our users might face a lot easier. RUM tracks actual user interactions, including page load times, clicks, and navigation flows. This gives our organization a clear picture of how our users are experiencing your application in real-world conditions, including slow-loading pages, errors, and other performance issues that affect user satisfaction. We can then easily prioritize these, and make sure we offer our users the best possible experience.
What needs improvement?
I'm not sure if this is on Datadog, however, Vercel integration is very limited.
They need to offer better/more customization on what logs we get and making tracing possible on Edge runtime logs is a real requirement. It is extremely difficult, if not completely impossible, to get working traces and logs displayed in Datadog with our stack of Vercel, NexJs, and Datadog. This is a very common stack in front end development and the difficulty of implementing it is unacceptable. Please do something about it soon. Front end logs matter.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for a little over a year.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Good alerting and issue detection for many valuable features
Pros and Cons
- "Thanks to frequent concurrent deployments, the DataDog alerts monitors allow us quickly detect issues if anything occurs."
- "The monitors can be improved."
What is our primary use case?
Our company has a microservice architecture, with different teams in charge of different services. Also, it is a start, which means that we have to build fast and move very fast as well. So before we were properly using DD, we often had issues of things breaking, but without much information on where in our system the breaking happened. This was quite a big-time sync as teams were unfamiliar with other teams' codes, so they needed the help of other teams to debug. This slowed our building down a lot. So implementing dd traces fixed this
What is most valuable?
DataDog has many features, but the most valuable have become our primary uses.
Also, thanks to frequent concurrent deployments, the DataDog alerts monitors allow us quickly detect issues if anything occurs.
What needs improvement?
The monitors can be improved. The chart in the monitors only goes back a couple of hours, clunky. Also, it can provide more info, like traces within the monitors. We have many alerts connected to different notification systems, such as Slack and Opsgenie.
When the on-caller receives notifications fired by the alerts, we are taken to the monitors. Yet often, we have to open up many different tabs to see logs, traces and info that is not accessible on the monitors. I think it would make all of the on callers' lives easier if the monitor had more data
For how long have I used the solution?
We've used the solution for three years.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
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: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Great UI and documentation but needs to offer K8s deployment monitoring in real-time
Pros and Cons
- "The installation step is pretty straightforward."
- "I'm not sure if Datadog can monitor K8s deployments in real-time. For instance, being able to see a deployment step by step visually. This would be helpful if there were any incidents during the deployment."
What is our primary use case?
We use Datadog to monitor our Kubernetes clusters.
We have 3 different clusters for different parts of the SDLC. We run the Datadog agent DaemonSet as well as the Datadog cluster agent. Our services have the APM installed by default.
To create monitors, we use Terraform. This is provided out-of-the-box for our service owner.
We run EKS on top of K8s, therefore, we also make use of some of the AWS monitoring capabilities that can be integrated into Datadog.
We are hugely reliant on Datadog for all aspects of our system.
How has it helped my organization?
With Datadog, we were able to gain observability in our system.
The installation step is pretty straightforward.
It's easy to use by non-DevOps users. For instance, our engineers do not interact with K8s often; therefore, it is hard for them to debug. However, with Datadog, they are able to view their containers and deployments with a single click.
We also heavily use the tags to help us identify who the service owners are. This is super useful when we need to track owners for patching or pick up new features we implemented.
What is most valuable?
The APM and K8s monitoring are the most valuable aspects of the solution. The K8s monitoring allows all customers to view their infra, even if they do not use K8s daily. They can just click on a few tabs to get all of the information they need.
It is also very easy to install on our system. APM has helped debug applications on our system as well. We were able to view why a service has suddenly shut down.
We also use Datadog for SLOs/SLAs as well. We check the live endpoint of services to ensure they are still up and running.
What needs improvement?
There is not much that needs to be improved.
The UI is super user-friendly. The deployment process is easy. We enjoy using the integrations with Slack and PagerDuty.
Customer support is awesome from our experience. There is a lot of documentation for us to be able to use if we need to.
I'm not sure if Datadog can monitor K8s deployments in real-time. For instance, being able to see a deployment step by step visually. This would be helpful if there were any incidents during the deployment.
In general, Datadog is a great solution.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used Datadog since I joined my company about a year ago.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We haven't had issues with the stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is really great.
How are customer service and support?
We've had no issues with the product or support.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is super simple, and the documentation was helpful.
What about the implementation team?
We managed the initial setup process in-house.
What was our ROI?
We've witnessed ROI in our DevOps.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
Software Engineering Manager at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Easy to implement with great passive and active monitoring
Pros and Cons
- "It is easy to implement and scale applications with standardized visibility, monitoring and alerting"
- "Datadog is so feature-rich that it is often hard to onboard new folks and tough to decide where to invest time."
What is our primary use case?
We primarily use the solution for application monitoring (APM, logs, metrics, alerts).
It's useful for active monitoring (static monitors, threshold monitors). We get a lot of value out of anomaly detection as well. SLOs and monitoring of SLOs have been another value add.
In terms of metrics, the out-of-the-box infrastructure metrics that come with the Datadog agent installation are great. We have made use of both the custom metrics implementation as well as the log-based metrics which are extremely convenient.
We also leverage Datadog for use of RUM and want to explore session replay.
How has it helped my organization?
It is easy to implement and scale applications with standardized visibility, monitoring and alerting
We get a lot of value out of passive and active monitoring. While different teams across our organization have used different services (metrics, logs, APM, RUM), almost all teams have been able to use the dashboards to report and track high-level metrics and active monitoring.
Active monitoring (static monitors, threshold monitors) is great. We get a lot of value out of anomaly detection as well. SLOs and monitoring of SLOs have been another value add for our organization.
What is most valuable?
The APM and tracing provide visibility and the ability to get right to root cause issues while being able to deploy new services without much need for custom instrumentation quickly
The active monitoring (static monitors, threshold monitors) has been very helpful. We get a lot of value out of anomaly detection. SLOs and monitoring of SLOs have been extremely valuable.
The metrics and out-of-the-box infrastructure metrics that come with the Datadog agent installation are quite helpful to the organization. We have made use of both the custom metric implementation as well as the log-based metrics which are extremely convenient.
What needs improvement?
Datadog is so feature-rich that it is often hard to onboard new folks and tough to decide where to invest time.
The APM is a perfect example of this. This feature alone has so much (profiling, tracing, span summary, flame graphs). I would love to see more of the insight and automation-focused features, such as the log patterns, where I can spend time more efficiently.
The cost of Datadog at scale can get very expensive very quickly. I would like to see a better usage/cost dashboard with breakdowns like the AWS cost explorer.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for three years.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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Updated: March 2026
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