Cisco Intersight vs. Datadog

Cisco Intersight is very well suited for doing firmware upgrades across all of your cisco hardware. So far we have had no problems pushing out new firmware. It's also well suited for hardware management. Cisco TAC has the ability to pull logs for the IMC for themselves, which saves you from having to pull the logs yourself and then uploading them to the case. It may or may not be appropriate for upgrading operating systems. I have not been able to test it.

Incentivized

Datadog works really well with complex microservices architecture like any E-commerce platform which will be having multiple services but they all are interdependent to others so in this scenario Datadog will be best to monitor these as it will show the transactions also between those microservices. If you are using multiple services in your architecture whether it will be cloud services or on prem services Datadog will be the best choice to monitor all those service with in Datadog so that you can see everything in a single place. But if you are having small architecture and few services in that then in that scenario you can use Datadog but it will be little costly as compared to other but obviously the features are very well.

Incentivized

• Standardising the environment by enforcing use of updating templates.
• Show the difference on a profile between what has changed and what setting was last deployed.
• Perform bulk deploy operation on profiles (like server profiles).
• Policies underpin all settings (e.g. no more defining individual VLANs before being able to use them, or having to clean them up manually when they are no longer in use. You deploy a Domain VLAN policy that states which VLANs are configured on a domain (either standalone) or a domain profile template (if domains profiles are bound to an updating domain profile template).

Incentivized

• Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
• Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
• Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
• DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
• Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.

Incentivized

• It would be great to not having to create EVERY profile within a deployment. since some items can be done be default, the defaults should be set and the deployment can be much faster.
• When adding Rack servers, indicating that the CIMC interface should not being connected before powering on the system and they it will be managed by Cisco Intersight can reduce down times. We had to manually reset our CIMC after disconnecting from our OOBM switches.

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

Been using Cisco Software as a service (SaaS) platform in a production environment for a large medical and health professionals that has critical healthcare and patients care dependency.

Support team is very helpful getting system updated as needed, and vendor support is fantastic. Also get a dedicated Cisco networking engine to review and advise system health and recommendations.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Usability of Cisco Intersight is highly dependent on the licensing purchased. The default (free) license level provides a lot of value for the minimal amount of effort to implement. The paid license levels provide additional features (detailed inventory, configuration management and deployment, etc.)

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

So far over the past 4 years we have not experienced any issues with the servers being available.

Incentivized

Could need some more refinement. It takes some time getting used to where different settings are being defined.

Incentivized

Every time we need Cisco Intersight support it takes weeks until we get a solution. We have to change the tac 2 to 3 times every time because none of the engineers have any idea about Intersight. Cisco has not trained their engineers. one has the impression that they are often seeing Intersight for the first time.

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

You really need a lab to get hands on but it was useful

Incentivized

Very smooth process and we did it for 2 data centers

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Our organisation has some experience with Dell OME (the centralised management plane for Dell PowerEdge server, equivalent to Cisco Intersight Infrastructure Service and UCS Manager, but not enough to contrast the two or say why one is better than the other.

Incentivized

Datadog is a more complex but complete solution than any of the other Log Aggregation, monitoring, or general observabilty tools that we have trialed. I found it easier to setup following useful and up-to-date documentation provided directly by Datadog instead of scattered around many blogs or articles. I would love to have my own Grafana + Prometheus expert to setup all the peices we need but you're paying for expertise there instead of an experience with Datadog.

Incentivized

Easy to add new services into it. Having everything policy driven makes it a lot easier to add new hardware into the solution and get setup.

Incentivized

• It has positively impacted our business by having a validated architecture that is repeating, redeploy able that scales.
• Some of the TAC tickets could have been solved with more detailed KB's. (ie. CIMC is managed by Cisco Intersight and not be our OOBM with rack servers)

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