Checkmk is a solution for IT Monitoring of servers,
applications, networks, cloud infrastructures (public, private, hybrid),
containers, storage, databases and environment sensors. It can be
deployed under all major Linux distributions or users can run it as Docker
container or virtual appliance on other operating systems including
Windows.
The tool is available as a Raw
Edition, which is open-source, and as an Enterprise Edition with a many
additional enterprise features. The…
$0
up to 10 systems
Datadog
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$18
per month per host
Pricing
Checkmk
Datadog
Editions & Modules
Checkmk Free Edition
$0.00
up to 10 systems
Checkmk Raw Edition
$0.00
unlimited & always free
Checkmk Enterprise Edition
starting at $600.00
Log Management
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Infrastructure
$15.00
per month (billed annually) per host
Standard
$18
per month per host
Enterprise
$27
per month per host
DevSecOps Pro
$27
per month per host
APM
$31.00
per month (billed annually) per host
DevSecOps Enterprise
$41
per month per host
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Checkmk
Datadog
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$600 for up to 3,000 Services / around 100 hosts
Optional
Additional Details
—
Discount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
In our organization which is a mash up of different hardware, software it was important to use an independent tool that wasn’t linked to one manufacturer incase a piece of hardware was dropped from support for example, we also value open-source software highly in our field. It’s important to in our IT environment to be able to customize and tweak software that we run. We don’t use the cloud monitoring aspect so Cannot comment on that side of the software.
Datadog can be pricey for larger scale businesses, so it really depends on your use case. For us, we have a small single deployment application and a small developer team, so our costs are mostly reasonable. There are more features than we can explore which can be somewhat overwhelming. It is mostly easy and intuitive to use but for larger scale you may consider rolling your own solutions.
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.
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
Overall Checkmk is a great product that is made and ran by a European company that is open source and highly customizable, great support if needed. On prem support is a must for our organization which Checkmk supports. Our organization has been using Checkmk for over 5 years now Performance of the software runs excellent on its own Linux server, for any company with a good Linux admin, you can have a lot of un tweaking and creating custom checks for every aspect of your environment.
There is some room for improvement, but the Datadog team sends out updates frequently, and the UI is user-friendly for engineers, with no significant loading issues or region-specific problems. That was one of the key reasons we preferred Datadog; our company has employees worldwide, and it wasn't difficult to transition to the tool.
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.
Checkmk free version is far superior to PRTG free version. For the paid versions PRTG was more efficient and easier to use. Checkmk provides unlimited services on their free version while PRTG is limited. We like to use the free version to avoid monthly or annual costs while still utilizing the same SNMP features.
It's a one-stop solution for all our needs whereas in other open-source tools, we have an operational overhead to keep and manage the uptime of these tools as well and also manage their versioning, upgrade, and patching cycle. Also if there are any bugs then we have to raise an open source issue and many problems as we have to keep 2 to 3 people aligned to manage the stack.
