Airbrake vs. Datadog vs. Sentry

Airbrake is very good at what it does, I don’t really have any criticism at all on that front. It’s less well-suited when bugfixing goes beyond the immediate error and means looking at a lot of context (particularly asynchronous context) like logs.

Incentivized

Datadog may be better suited for teams that have a more out-of-the-box infrastructure, on the primary platforms Datadog supports. You may also have better results if you have a bigger team dedicated to devops and/or a bigger budget. We found that trying to adapt it to our use case (small team, .NET on AWS Fargate) wasn't feasible. We continually ran into roadblocks that required us to dig through documentation (and at times, having to figure out some documentation was wrong), go back and forth with support, and in my opinion, waste money on excessive and unintended usages due to opaque pricing models and inaccurate usage reports, as well as broken/non-functional rate sampling controls.

Incentivized

Great for standard web application performance monitoring, analytics and error reporting. Shows line level code errors, gives insight into performance issues (plugins, API issues, etc.). Automation and scheduled scanning in production gives client visibility into 'after deployment' value. Also lets a relatively small number of developers keep tabs on a handful of different site/applications without needing a bunch of tools. The UI is pretty complicated and can be overwhelming for new users. Documentation could be better for the learning curve,

Incentivized

• Integration with most of languages and frameworks as well support via existing logging configs.
• Aggregations on occurrences which helps to understand and analyse issues better.
• Web UI displays all error related parameters which I never could have figured out in manual debugging.

• The thing which Datadog does really well, one of them are its broad range of services integrations and features which makes it one step observability solution for all. We can monitor all types of our application, infrastructure, hosts, databases etc with Datadog.
• Its custom dashboard feature which helps us to visualize the data in a better way . It supports different types of charts through those charts we can create our dashboard more attractive.
• Its AI powered alerting capability though that we can easily identify the root cause and also it has a low noise alerting capability which means it correlated the similar type of issues.

Incentivized

• Great web interface. Lots of data available in a really clean format, with filtering options and more.
• Per-user exception tracking. User is complaining about something being broken? Look up their account ID in Sentry and you can see if they've run into any exceptions (with device information included, of course).
• Source map uploading. Took a little while to figure this out but now we have our deploy script upload sourcemaps to Sentry on each deployment, meaning we get to see stack traces that aren't obfuscated!
• Very generous free tier – 10,000 events per month. We're nowhere near that yet.

Incentivized

• We use Airbrake in conjunction with OpsGenie, but I feel like there could be more room for integration between the two.
• I think it would also be nice if there was a GitHub integration that would comment on recently merged error-prone PRs, currently, we need to dig into the error to find the commit.
• Generally, more integrations would be nice as people often forget about Airbrake when they are stressed out about an issue.

Incentivized

• Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
• I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
• I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame

Incentivized

• Alert Configuration. Would be really helpful to have multiple logical groupings within the "If" section of a single configurable alert.
• Alert Copying. Being able to copy an alert from one project to another would be super beneficial.
• Alert Tags. Better UI around how we select which tags are getting sent with each alert instead of a tiny text box.

Incentivized

Definitely will not revisit after our issues and, in my opinion, poor support.

Incentivized

There are so many features that it can be hard to figure out where you need to go for your own use case. For example, RUM monitoring us buried in a "Digital Experience" sidebar setting when this is one of our key use cases that I sometimes struggle to find in the application. It appears that ECS + Fargate monitoring was recently released which is great because we had to build a lambda reporting solution for ephemeral task monitoring. But this new feature was never on my radar until I starting clicking around the application.

Incentivized

Its incredibly versatile, but that leads to complexity for the uninitiated, which can be intimidating. Nevertheless its a well polished product, in our case leading to only using it for a focus on frontend is still more cost effective than buying a one-to-rule-them-all tool...

Incentivized

The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.

Incentivized

Documentation was difficult to work through, rollout was catastrophic (completely outage)

Incentivized

I love to use Airbrake and New Relic in conjunction. New Relic has better metrics and data that you can really dig into (especially for optimizations), but the error part has always been kinda meh. I fee like Airbrake has done an awesome job at this

Our logs are very important, and Datadog manages them exceptionally well. We frequently use Datadog services for our investigations. Use case: Monitor your apps, infrastructure, APIs, and user experience.


Key features:


Logs, metrics, and APM (Application Performance Monitoring)


Real-time alerting and dashboards


Supports Kubernetes, AWS, GCP, and other integrations


RUM (Real User Monitoring) and Synthetics





✅ Best for backend, server, and distributed systems monitoring.

Incentivized

It is cheaper and offers better support for front-end applications for enterprise large environments with more then 30 scrum teams and hundreds of micro frontend applications. The configuration options, both with the agent and from the user interface, are superior to other tools, and the documentation is also very easy to use.

Incentivized

• Hugely reduced frontend errors in devices we don’t often test: means more conversions and sales
• Lets us know immediately when there is an error: shorter error durations also means higher sales
• Ultimately once we’ve solved all the most common bugs: more time for developers to focus on other things

Incentivized

• Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
• Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
• Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.

Incentivized

• So it has helped us for quick error resolutions.
• From dashboard we are able to assign errors to particular member and see when its resolved.
• Without customer informing us about errors we know what happened in real time helps in customer service also.

Incentivized