Datadog Reviews

The current use case for Datadog in our environment is observability.  We use Datadog as the primary log ingestion and analysis point, along with consolidation of application/infrastructure metrics across cloud environments and realtime alerting to issues that arise in production.  

Datadog integrates within all aspects of our infrastructure and applications to provide valuable insights into Containers, Serverless functions, Deep Logging Analysis, Virtualized Hardware and Cost Optimizations.

Datadog improved our observability layer by creating a consistent, centralized service for all of our varied cloud-based applications. All of our production and non-production environment applications and infrastructure send metrics directly to Datadog for analysis and determination of any issues that would need to be looked at by the Infrastructure, Platform and Development teams for quick remediation. Using Datadog as this centralized Observability platform has enabled us to become leaner without sacrificing project timelines when issues arise and require triage for efficient resolution.

All of Datadog's features have become valuable tools in our cloud environments.

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 two areas I could see needing improvement or a feature to add value are building a more robust SIM that would include container scanning to rival other such products on the market so we do not need to extend functionality to another third-party provider. The other expands the alerting functions by creating a new feature to add direct SMS notifications, on-call rotation scheduling, etc., that could replace the need to have this as an external third party solution integration. 

I've been a Datadog user for almost ten years.

Datadog is very stable, and we've only come across a few items that needed to be addressed quickly when there were issues.

Scalability is very favorable, aside from cost/budget, which limits the scalability of this platform.

Both customer service and support need a little work, as we have had a number of requests/issues that were not addressed as we needed them to be.

Being an Observability SME, I have used many native and third party solutions, including Dynatrace, New Relic, CloudWatch and Zabbix. As previously mentioned, Datadog provides a superior platform for centralizing and consolidating our Observability layer. Switching to Datadog was a no-brainer when most other solutions either didn't provide the maturity of functions, or have them available, at all.

The initial setup was very straightforward, and the integrations were easily configured.

We implemented Datadog in-house.

For the most part, Datadog's ROI is quite impressive when you consider all of the features and functions that are centralized on the platform. It doesn't require us to purchase additional third-party solutions to fill in the gaps.

The setup was dead simple once the cloud integrations and agent components were identified and executed. Licensing falls into our normal third-party processes, so it was a familiar feeling when we started with Datadog. Cost is the only outlier when it comes to a perfect solution. Datadog is expensive, and each add-on drives that cost further into the realm of requiring justifications to finance expanding the core suite of features we would like to enable.

Yes, we evaluated several competing platforms that included Dynatrace, New Relic and Zabbix.

They should provide more inclusive pricing, or an "all you can eat" tier that would include all relevant features, as opposed to individual cost increases to let Datadog to become more valuable and replace even more third-party solutions that have a lower cost of entry.

We use the solution for APM, AWS, Lambda, logging, and infrastructure. We have many different things all over AWS, and having one place to look is great.

We have all sorts of different AWS things out there that are in C# and Node. Having a single place to log and APM into is very important to us.

Keeping track of the cloud infrastructure is also important. We have Lambda, containers, EC2, etc.

Having a super simple interface to filter the searching for APM and logging is great. It is super easy to show people how to use. This is super important to us.

Finding issues quickly is super important. Being able to create dashboards and alert on issues.

Having the ability to create dashboards has really taught us how to utilize the searching part of the system. We are able to share them, and build upon them so easily. Many iterations later people are putting some solid information out there.

Alerting is also important to us. We have set up many alerts that help us spot issues in the platform before they become bigger issues. This has enabled my teams to use incidents and address the issues so they are no longer problems.

Alerting on running systems is very helpful. Finding issues is quick. We have one place for logging, searching through. Being able to save these and reference them in the future and build upon them.

The logging in general is one of my favorite features. The search is so straight forward and easy to use. Just being able to click on a field and add it to search has taught me so much about the interface, It might not be as useful without a shortcut like that to teach me the system. We have Cloudflare logs in there, and I have no idea sometimes how to filter on such a buried piece of JSON. That is where the interface helps me by clicking on the add to search I get what I need.

The "Pager Duty" replacement is something we are very interested in. We only really use pager duty to call the team when things are down.

I love to have some DD guru come in and do a department training directly at our setup. We would love to have someone come in and show us the things we could do better within our current setup.

Also saving a bit of cash would also help if there are things we are doing that are costing us. It's a big enough tool that it is tough to have someone dedicated to manage. 

I've used the solution for a bit over a year at this point.

The stability seems good here too.

Scalability seems good to me. I have no complaints

I get answers from our contact, and one team member did reach out. It went well.

Positive

We used Loggly. 

We switched because we wanted an all-in-one tool

Some parts of our setup were tough. Some Windows container setups cost us a lot of time.

The AWS infrastructure was tough to fully turn on due to the large cost of everything being run.

We handled the setup ourselves in-house.

This cost us more overall. ROI is hard to sell. That said, I can find issues way faster and see what is going on in my entire platform. I pay back the cost every month with productivity. 

It is going to cost you more than you think to keep everything running. We saw value in the one-for-all solution, however, it came at a premium to what we were paying. 

We did evaluate Dynatrace.

Our primary use case for this solution is comprehensive cloud monitoring across our entire infrastructure and application stack. 

We operate in a multi-cloud environment, utilizing services from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. 

Our applications are predominantly containerized and run on Kubernetes clusters. We have a microservices architecture with dozens of services communicating via REST APIs and message queues. 

The solution helps us monitor the performance, availability, and resource utilization of our cloud resources, databases, application servers, and front-end applications. 

It's essential for maintaining high availability, optimizing costs, and ensuring a smooth user experience for our global customer base. We particularly rely on it for real-time monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting of production issues.

Datadog has significantly improved our organization by providing us with great visibility across the entire application stack. This enhanced observability has allowed us to detect and resolve issues faster, often before they impact our end-users. 

The unified platform has streamlined our monitoring processes, replacing several disparate tools we previously used. This consolidation has improved team collaboration and reduced context-switching for our DevOps engineers. 

The customizable dashboards have made it easier to share relevant metrics with different stakeholders, from developers to C-level executives. We've seen a marked decrease in our mean time to resolution (MTTR) for incidents, and the historical data has been invaluable for capacity planning and performance optimization. 

Additionally, the AI-driven insights have helped us proactively identify potential issues and optimize our infrastructure costs.

We've found the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) feature to be the most valuable, as it provides great visibility on trace-level data. This granular insight allows us to pinpoint performance bottlenecks and optimize our code more effectively. 

The distributed tracing capability has been particularly useful in our microservices environment, helping us understand the flow of requests across different services and identify latency issues. 

Additionally, the log management and analytics features have greatly improved our ability to troubleshoot issues by correlating logs with metrics and traces. 

The infrastructure monitoring capabilities, especially for our Kubernetes clusters, have helped us optimize resource allocation and reduce costs.

While Datadog is an excellent monitoring solution, it could be improved by building more features to replace alerting apps like OpsGenie and PagerDuty. Specifically, we'd like to see more advanced incident management capabilities integrated directly into the platform. This could include features like sophisticated on-call scheduling, escalation policies, and incident response workflows. 

Additionally, we'd appreciate more customizable machine learning-driven anomaly detection to help us identify unusual patterns more accurately. Improved support for serverless architectures, particularly for monitoring and tracing AWS Lambda functions, would be beneficial. 

Enhanced security monitoring and threat detection capabilities would also be valuable, potentially reducing our reliance on separate security information and event management (SIEM) tools.

I've used the solution for two years.

We currently have an error monitor to monitor errors on our prod environment.  Once we hit a certain threshold, we get an alert on Slack. This helps address issues the moment they happen before our users notice. 

We also utilize synthetic tests on many pages on our site. They're easy to set up and are great for pinpointing when a bug is shipped, but they may take down a less visited page that we aren't immediately aware of. It's a great extra check to make sure the code we ship is free of bugs.

The synthetic tests have been invaluable. We use them to check various pages and ensure functionality across multiple areas. Furthermore, our error monitoring alerts have been crucial in letting us know of problems the moment they pop up.  

Datadog has been a great tool, and all of our teams utilize many of its features.  We have regular mob sessions where we look at our Datadog error logs and see what we can address as a team. It's been great at providing more insight into our users and logging errors that can be fixed.

The error logs have been super helpful in breaking down issues affecting our users. Our monitors let us know once we hit a certain threshold as well, which is good for momentary blips and issues with third-party providers or rollouts that we have in the works. Just last week, we had a roll-out where various features were broken due to a change in our backend API. Our Datadog logs instantly notified us of the issues, and we could troubleshoot everything much more easily than just testing blind. This was crucial to a successful rollout.

I honestly can't think of anything that can be improved. We've started using more and more features from our Datadog account and are really grateful for all of the different ways we can track and monitor our site. 

We did have an issue where a synthetic test was set up before the holiday break, and we were quickly charged a great amount. Our team worked with Datadog, and they were able to help us out since it was inadvertent on our end and was a user error. That was greatly appreciated and something that helped start our relationship with the Datadog team.

We've been using Datadog for several months. We started with the synthetic tests and now use It for error handling and in many other ways.

Stability has been great. We've had no issues so far.

The solution is very easy to scale. We've used it on multiple clients.

We had a dev who had set up a synthetic test that was running every five minutes in every single region over the holiday break last year. The Datadog team was great and very understanding and we were able to work this out with them.

Positive

We didn't have any previous solution. At a previous company, I've used Sentry. However, I also find Datadog to be much easier, plus the inclusion of synthetic tests is awesome.

The documentation was great and our setup was easy.

We implemented the solution in-house.

This has had a great ROI as we've been able to address critical bugs that have been found via our Datadog tools.

The setup cost was minimal. The documentation is great and the product is very easy to set up.

We also looked at other providers and settled on Datadog. It's been great to use across all our clients.

We use the solution for logs, infrastructure metrics, and APM. We have many different teams using it across both product and data engineering.

The solution has improved our observability by giving us rapid log search, a correlation between hosts/logs/APM, and tons of features in one website.

I enjoy the rapid log search. It's such a pleasure to quickly find what you're looking for. The ease of graph building is also nice, and MUCH easier than Prometheus.

It is far too easy to run up huge unexpected costs. The billing model is not flexible enough to handle cases where you temporarily have thousands of nodes. It is not price effective for monitoring big data jobs. We had to switch to open-source Grafana plus Prometheus for those.

It would be cool to have an open telemetry agent that automatically APM instruments everything in the next release.

I've used the solution for three years.

I'd rate the stability ten out of ten.

I'd rate the scalability ten out of ten.

We did not previously use a different solution.

The setup is very straightforward. Users just install the helm chart, and boom, you're done.

We handled the setup in-house.

Be careful about pricing. Make sure you understand the billing model and that there are multiple billing models available. Set up alarms to alert you of cost overruns before they get too bad.

We've never evaluated other solutions.

It's a great product. However, you have to pay for quality.

We use the solution for monitoring microservices in a complex AWS-based cloud service.  

The system is comprised of about a dozen services. This involves processing real-time data from tens of thousands of internet connected devices that are providing telemetry. Thousands of user interactions are processed along with real-time reporting of device date over transaction intervals that can last for hours or even days. The need to view and filter data over periods of several months is not uncommon.  

Datadog is used for daily monitoring and R&D research as well as during incident response.

The query filtering and improved search abilities offered by Datadog are by far superior to other solutions we were using, such as AWS CloudWatch. We find that we can simply get at the data we need quicker and easier than before. This has made responding to incidents or investigating issues a much more productive endeavour. We simply have less roadblocks in the way when we need to "get at the data". It is also used occasionally to extract data while researching requirements for new features.

Datadog dashboards are used to provide a holistic view of the system across many services. Customizable views as well as the ability to "dive in" when we see someting anomalous has improved the workflow for handling incidents.    

Log filtering, pattern detection and grouping, and extracting values from logs for plotting on graphs all help to improve our ability to visualize what is going on in the system. The custom facets allow us to tailor the solution to fit our specific needs.

There are some areas on log filtering screens where the user interface can take some getting used to. Perhaps having the option for a simple vs advanced user interface would be helpful in making new or less experienced users comfortable with making their own custom queries.

Maybe it is just how our system is configured, yet finding the valid values for a key/value pair is not always intuitively obvious to me. While there is a pop-up window with historical or previously used values and saved views from previous query runs, I don't see a simple list or enumeration of the set of valid values for keys that have such a restriction.

I've used the solution for one year.

The solution is very stable.

The product is reasonably scalable, although costs can get out of hand if you aren't careful.

I have not had the need to contact support.

Neutral

We did use AWS CloudWatch. It was to awkward to use effectively and simply didn't have the features.

We had someone experienced do the initial setup.  However, with a little training, it wasn't too bad for the rest of us.

We handled the setup in-house.

Take care of how you extract custom values from logs. You can do things without thought to make your life easier and not realize how expensive it can be from where you started.

I'm not aware of evaluating other solutions.

Overall I recommend the solution. Just be mindful of costs.

Our primary use case is custom and vendor supplied web application log aggregation, performance tracing and alerting. We run a mix of AWS EC2, Azure serverless, and colocated VMWare servers to support higher education web applications. 

Managing a hybrid multi-cloud solution across hundreds of applications is always a challenge. Datadog agents on each web host, and native integrations with GitHub, AWS, and Azure gets all of our instrumentation and error data in one place for easy analysis and monitoring.

Through use of Datadog across all of our apps we were able to consolidate a number of alerting and error tracking apps and Datadog ties them all together in cohesive dashboards. 

Whether the app is vendor-supplied or we built it ourselves, the depth of tracing, profiling, and hooking into logs is all obtainable and tunable. Both legacy .NET Framework and Windows Event Viewer and cutting edge .NET Core with streaming logs all work. 

The breadth of coverage for any app type or situation is really incredible. It feels like there's nothing we can't monitor.

When it comes to Datadog, several features have proven particularly valuable. The centralized pipeline tracking and error logging provides a comprehensive view of our development and deployment processes, making it much easier to identify and resolve issues quickly. 

Synthetic testing has been a game-changer, allowing us to catch potential problems before they impact real users. Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most. And 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. 

Together, these features form a powerful toolkit that helps us maintain high performance and reliability across our applications and infrastructure, ultimately leading to better user satisfaction and more efficient operations.

I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view. I like the idea of monitoring on the go yet it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box. While the documentation is very good considering all the frameworks and technology Datadog covers, there are areas - specifically .NET Profiling and Tracing of IIS-hosted apps - that need a lot of focus to pick up on the key details needed. In some cases the screenshots don't match the text as updates are made. I spent longer than I should figuring out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables.

I've used the solution for about three years.

We have been impressed with the uptime and clean and light resource usage of the agents.

The solution is very scalable, very customizable.

Service is always helpful in tuning our committed costs and alerting us when we start spending outside the on-demand budget.

We used a mix of a custom error email system, SolarWinds, UptimeRobot, and GitHub actions. We switched to find one platform that could give deep app visibility regardless of whether it is Linux or Windows or Container, cloud or on-prem hosted.

The setup was generally simple. However, .NET Profiling of IIS and aligning logs to traces and profiles was a challenge.

We implemented the solution in-house. 

I'd count our ROI as significant time saved by the development team assessing bugs and performance issues.

Set up live trials to asses cost scaling. Small decisions around how monitors are used can have big impacts on cost scaling. 

NewRelic was considered. LogicMonitor was chosen over Datadog for our network and campus server management use cases.

I'm excited to dig further into the new offerings around LLM and continue to grow our footprint in Datadog. 

We are using Datadog to improve our cloud monitoring and observability across our enterprise apps.  We have integrated a lot of different resources into Datadog, like Kubernetes, App Gateways, App Service Environments, App Service Plans, and other Web App resources. 

I will be using the monitoring and observability features of Datadog. Dashboards are used very heavily by teams and SREs. We really have seen that Datadog has already improved both our monitoring and our observability.

The ease and speed of which you can create a dashboard has been a huge improvement.  

The different types of monitors we can create have been huge, too. We can do so many different things with monitors that we couldn't do before with our alerts. 

Being able to click on a trace or log and drill down on it to see what happened has been great.  

Some have found the learning curve a bit steep. That said,they are coming around slowly. There is just a lot of information to learn how to navigate.

The different types of monitors have been very valuable. We have been able to make our alerts (monitors) more actionable than we were able to previously.  

Watchdog is a favorite feature among a lot of the devs. It catches things they didn't even know were an issue. 

RUM is another feature a lot of us are looking forward to seeing how it can help us improve our customer experience during tax season.  

We hope to enable the code review feature at some point to so we can see what code caused the issue.

I would like to see the integration between PagerDuty and Datadog improved.  The tags in Datadog don't match those in PagerDuty, and we have to make it work.  Also, I would like to see if the ability to replicate a KQL query in Datadog is made easier or better.  

I would like to see the alert communications to email or phones made better so we could hopefully move off PagerDuty and just use Datadog for that. 

There are also a lot of features that we haven't budgeted for yet and I would like for us to be able to use them in the future.

I've used the solution for about two years.

In our fast-paced environment, managing and analyzing log data and performance metrics is crucial. That’s where Datadog comes in. We rely on it not just for monitoring but for deeper insights into our systems, and here’s how we make the most of it. 

One of the first things we appreciate about Datadog is its ability to centralize logs from various sources—think applications, servers, and cloud services. This means we can access everything from one dashboard, which saves us a lot of time and hassle. Instead of digging through multiple platforms, we have all our log data in one place, making it much easier to track events and troubleshoot issues.

Before Datadog, we faced the common challenge of fragmented data. Our logs, metrics, and traces were spread across different tools and platforms, making it difficult to get a complete picture of our system’s health. 

With Datadog, we now have a centralized monitoring solution that aggregates everything in one place. This has streamlined our workflow immensely. Whether it’s logs from our servers, metrics from our applications, or traces from user transactions, we can access all this information easily. This unified view has made it simpler for our teams to identify and troubleshoot issues quickly.

In my experience with Datadog, one feature stands out above the rest is the Log Explorer. It has completely transformed the way I interact with our log data and has become an essential part of my daily workflow. 

The user interface is incredibly intuitive. When I first started using it, I was amazed at how easy it was to navigate. The design is clean and straightforward, allowing me to focus on the data rather than getting lost in complicated menus. Whether I’m searching for specific log entries or filtering by certain criteria, everything feels seamless. 

This ease of use allowed me to get up to speed with log management since it's my first time using Datadog.

Interactive tutorials could be a game changer. Instead of just reading about how to use query filters, users could engage with step-by-step guides that walk them through the process. For example, a tutorial could start with a simple query and gradually introduce more complex filtering techniques, allowing users to practice along the way. These tutorials could include pop-up tips and hints that provide additional context or best practices as users work through examples. This hands-on approach not only reinforces learning but also builds confidence in using the tool.

My company has recently made Datadog available to it's software engineers and I personally have been using it for almost a year now.

We use the product for instrumentation, observability, monitoring, and alerting of our system. 

We have multiple environments and a variety of pieces of infrastructure including servers, databases, load balancers, cache, etc. and we need to be able to monitor all of these pieces, while also retaining visibility into how the various pieces interact with each other. 

Tracing data between components and user interactions that trigger these data flows is particularly important for understanding where problems arise and how to resolve them quickly.

It provides a lot of options for integrations and tooling to observe what is happening within the system, making diagnosis and triage easier/faster. 

Each user can set up their own dashboards and share them with other users on the team. We can instrument monitors based on various patterns that we care about, then notify us when an event triggers an alert with platforms such as Slack or PagerDuty. 

Our ability to rapidly become aware of problems focused on the symptoms being observed and entry points into the tool to rapidly identify where to investigate further is important for our team and our users.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include log search to help triage specific problems that we get notified about (whether by alerts we have configured or users that have contacted us), APM traces (to view how user interactions trace through the various layers of our infrastructure and services to be able to reproduce and identify the source of problems), general performance/system dashboards (to regularly monitor for stability or deviation), and alerting (to be automatically informed when a problem occurs). We also use the incident tools for tracking production incidents.

In some ways, the tool has a pretty steep learning curve. Discovering the various capabilities available, then learning how to utilize them for particular use cases can be challenging. Thankfully, there is a good amount of documentation with some good examples (more are always welcome), and support is very helpful. 

While DataDog has started adding more correlation mapping between services and parts of our system, it is still tricky to understand what is the ultimate root cause when multiple views/components spike. Additionally, there are lots of views and insights that are available but hard to find or discover. Some of the best ways to discover is to just click around a lot and get familiar with views that are useful, but that takes time and isn't ideal when in the middle of fighting a fire.

I've used the solution for about four years.

It seems stable.

It seems to scale well. Performance for aggregating or searching is usually very fast.

Technical support is helpful and pretty responsive.

Positive

We did not use a different solution. 

It's hard to say what ROI would be as I have not managed our system without it to compare to.

I don't manage licensing.

We did not evaluate other options. 

It's a great tool with new features and improvements continuously being added. It is not simple to use or set up, however, if you have the right personnel, you can get a lot of value from what DataDog has to offer.