ControlUp vs. Datadog

An environment where visibility of general performance metrics isn't currently done or is done with a system that is difficult to use (which was our case). An environment where resource allocation decisions need to be made (e.g. how much RAM and CPU to allocate to VM pools). An environment where a troubleshooting tool is needed (e.g. to answer the question, "Why is this person experiencing poor performance right now?")

As per my experience, Datadog is best suited for complex, cloud-native environments where unified observability is critical, as it integrates seamlessly with AWS and Azure. Moreover, it provides deep visibility into latency and error rates. Datadog pricing is less appropriate for Startups with a tight budget and for organizations needing advanced incident management.

• The triggers are very flexible and can be configured to alert on things from events in sessions to hardware failures. Script actions are what they sound like. They are scripts that can be created and run on demand or tied to a trigger. One example is that if a hard drive is low on space we have a script to clean up certain things on the drive.
• Script actions are supported by the ControlUp community. Community members can submit scripts that are reviewed by ControlUp and approved. This means more script are added over time.
• ControlUp support and sales support has been great. Our sales engineer is always willing to jump on and help us with configuration issues and standard support is quick to respond and are good at resolving issues.

Incentivized

• 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

• It seems that there is a gradual transition occurring from one interface (a local program) to another (Web). This creates confusion at times.
• ScoutBees module has a problem with our version of Horizon, so we can't do a login test
• The local program for ControlUp uses a lot of resources
• The training session focus on very large environments, which we aren't. Might be good to offer SMB sessions separately.

• 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

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

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 feel all these products are good and have their strengths but for me it came down to two categories. How easy is it to find issues and cost. It seemed to me that the easiest to use is ControlUp and eG. Price broke down to ControlUp and SysTrack being lower than Goliath and eG.

Incentivized

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

• its licensing cost is a bit on high

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