Cisco UCS Manager vs Datadog

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a data center and use the Cisco UCS Blade platform with SAN storage, then UCS manager is the right tool for you. Managing one or a few host servers with UCS manager is pretty easy. You can see pretty quick what is going on with your servers. If you need to configure the fabric interconnects, you pretty much need to use UCS manager to do it. I find that it meets the needs for almost everything we do with the UCS C and B servers. If you have hyper flex servers from Cisco, then you would not want to use UCS manger. If you are not using Cisco servers you may not be able to use UCS manager.

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Verified User

Manager in Information Technology

Mining & Metals Company, 501-1000 employees

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Datadog is a no-brainer for any environment that relies on multiple servers. Even for one server, it's so much better to use for monitoring and alert capability than anything else I remember looking at before we started using Datadog. Teams can even use it to track their progress of investigating an alert so multiple people aren't unknowingly looking into the same exact issue unnecessarily.

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Verified User

Director in Research & Development

Financial Services Company, 1-10 employees

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Pros

Service Templates: Provision new hardware using templates in the matter of minutes.
Firmware updates: Modifying the FW level on a template will kick off an FW upgrade on all attached equipment.
Consolidated Views: See all equipment in a single view.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Banking Company, 201-500 employees

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APIs, the ability to interact with the data we pull into data dog is key. We port the information over to Servicenow, so the ability to pull everything into DataDog, then Servicenow, is a key component of our success here at Wayfair.
Simple Interface - clean, useful, effective. Allows users to use DataDog for one reason, get work done.
Lightweight agent on hosts

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Anthony Zappala

ServiceNow Lead Engineer/Architect

WayfairInformation Technology and Services, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

UCSM is known for its bugs, especially during code upgrades.
Similar options can be set in a variety of places with varying effects.

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Tom Erdman

Network Systems Administrator

Johnson County LibraryLibraries, 201-500 employees

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User interface could be improved in some areas, looking for host information and the agent install link takes a bit of time.
Configuration of the agent is generally done via a config file which is a pro and a con. It would be nice to have some UI to configure various agent options.
Billing isn't entirely straightforward, they could use more reports to figure out the source of your monthly costs.

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Kevin Van Heusen

Software Architect

SpringAheadInternet, 51-200 employees

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Usability

No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Datadog 10.0

Based on 1 answer

The user interface is quite intuitive with the exception of the network map. As a deployer of software, it is trivial to setup.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Information Technology & Services Company, 501-1000 employees

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Support Rating

Cisco UCS Manager 9.0

Based on 4 answers

Cisco UCSM Support has been very quick to reply and address our concerns, issues, and questions. We have found that Cisco's documentation is clear and concise and fairly easy to find. With Cisco support's help, we are able to quickly and safely meet the demands of our end-users, consistently.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Education Management Company, 51-200 employees

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Datadog 8.4

Based on 12 answers

Our experience working with their support found them to be helpful and quick to respond. Also, as many of their integrations are open source, improvements we desired could be tracked and even driven by us. Their documentation is excellent and makes integrating their tooling simple and makes standing up monitoring for new application a quick and painless process.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Human Resources Company, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

We were a IBM Blade Center shop. IBM was easier to manage. However, it was not as all inclusive. The IBM served us well, but when we started pricing out options Cisco came in a little less expensive on the current promotion they were running. The Cisco UCS has proven to be more stable and reliable, as well.

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Verified User

Project Manager in Information Technology

Higher Education Company, 201-500 employees

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New Relic APM is a great application performance monitoring tool, but the agent was producing an increased load on our system compared to Datadog. Datadog also gives the flexibility of going outside of the boundaries of the application and looking at system performance as well, which can have a large impact on application performance.

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Stephen Groat

Senior Security Engineer

TealiumMarketing and Advertising, 201-500 employees

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Return on Investment

We were able to achieve a positive ROI on the system within 18 months. This might be unique to our situation. Priced against buying traditional servers and fabrics it would stack up favorably.
The ability to easily expand our infrastructure with blades is a strength. The profiles allow us to add a new server which is configured and deployed in a much shorter amount of time than traditional server infrastructure.

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Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology

Information Services Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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One of our critical production databases went down a couple of weeks back. Just because we had the Datadog monitoring enabled for that database, Datadog sent the alerts to PagerDuty and we were instantly notified via pager and email alert. We could act right away and bring up the database within a few mins.
Ability to create custom screenboards have allowed us to track the critical and warning alerts in front of our eyes all the time

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Rajeshh Raghavan

Systems Analyst, Engineering

Dreamworks AnimationEntertainment, 1001-5000 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

Cisco UCS Manager Editions & Modules

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Additional Pricing Details

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General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

Optional

Datadog Editions & Modules

On-premise Edition

Infrastructure	$15.00¹
Log Management	$1.27²
APM	$31.00³

Per Host Per Month
Per Million Log Events
Per Host Per Month

SaaS Edition

Free	$0¹
Standard	$15/host²
Enterprise	Custom³

Up to 5 hosts
Up to 500 hosts
500+ hosts

Additional Pricing Details

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Cisco UCS Manager vs Datadog