Cisco Meraki Dashboard vs. Datadog

Well suited is if you do configuration one time and roll out to multiple sites, multiple networks, multiple wireless S societies. You create a profile and rollout, and you use automation that takes care of a lot of your manual work. So it's pretty suitable for those divers. Anything related to customization that a Cisco Meraki Dashboard doesn't offer and you use your other automation tool, I think there is an improvement for Cisco Meraki Dashboard to involve all those features and integrate with other third party services.

Incentivized

If I want to see what customers are doing wrong in their sessions, we can do that easily. On the other hand, if we want to know the payload in the API calls, that is the area where Datadog can improve.

Incentivized

• Oh, just the ease of use. I am not an IT technical expert by trade—I’m more on the leadership side. So this makes it easy for me to understand everything that is going on and be able to provide an honest review of how the organization is doing at that particular time.

• 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

• Some features are unavailable when the network doesn't have a switch (network topology, for example)
• I wish there was an overview for all organizations with pending firmware updates, rather than going through one-by-one.
• I would like to have some of the switch tools available for firewall devices (port cycling, line testing).

Incentivized

• In my experience, .NET Tracing Agent caused severe and untraceable performance issues
• In my opinion, usage and billing structures were opaque and surprising
• In my experience, documentation was incomplete, contradicting or sometimes completely wrong, even for common infrastructure (AWS Fargate)
• I feel support was unhelpful at times, and bounced us back and forth to other teams
• In my opinion, multiple methods of sample rate control were ineffective, adding to excessive usage and cost

Incentivized

Very pleased with he product overall. it is used as expecting + easy to use and very scalable if we want to add new orgs

Incentivized

Its a one stop solution for most processes and does reduce cost overall. This does in turn help teams communicate in a much more efficient way, also RUM is a game changer for any quality product; we use RUM alot for debugging and reverse engineering issues. Reports and coverage has been a plus, it all has helped us a lot in our processes.

Incentivized

Cisco Meraki Dashboard is a modern interface that makes it easy to find devices and their health status. It has powerful remote tools that can help you manage every aspect of the network at a granular level. Something that may be frustrating is that some advanced settings are sometimes oversimplified, and the customization is limited.

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

Support seems very knowledgeable and provides detail summary about the call. They even follow up later to check on your case.

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

Cisco Meraki Dashboard is easy to use compared to other vendors. They do not have all the intricate configurations offered by products from competitors, but for the price point and what it gives you there is nothing better. The lower learning curve with onboarding a new hire and get them familiar with Meraki is much easier which our company loves.

Incentivized

In terms of usability, I’ve found Datadog significantly more approachable and powerful compared to Elasticsearch, especially for day-to-day operational monitoring. Datadog offers a much more cohesive, user-friendly interface out of the box, with built-in support for metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, and dashboards—all tightly integrated. In contrast, Elasticsearch often felt barebones and required considerable setup and additional tooling (like Kibana or Logstash) to reach the same level of functionality.
While Elasticsearch is excellent for high-volume log ingestion and full-text search, it lacks the depth of features and real-time visualization capabilities that Datadog provides natively. The query language in Datadog is also quite usable and comparable for my needs—mainly filtering and aggregating logs and metrics—without needing to learn Elasticsearch's more complex DSL. Overall, Datadog saves our team time and effort, whereas Elasticsearch often felt like building a monitoring system from scratch. The all-in-one nature of Datadog, despite its complexity, is ultimately more efficient and scalable for our use case.

Incentivized

• When there's an issue with communication to the cloud. EX: unable to fetch configs. This due to like new device being installed or if you have to factory reset the device. This has been a negative impact.
• Incorrect status. Sometimes the status of the device or network is not reflected as it should be. This has had a negative impact in the past. However, for the most part, the Status is fairly accurate.
• Incident response has been very good. Anytime an issue has been reported to Cisco regarding Cisco Meraki Dashboard, the issue is quickly investigated and doesn't take long to resolve.
• Customer support and Cisco's technical team has been very helpful and responsive.

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