Datadog vs DX Spectrum Formerly CA Spectrum

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.

As I said before, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think about how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.

• Well Suited - Networking Monitoring
• Less Appropriate - When you need to customize some monitoring and to update the version

• 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

• Polling and traps can be configured to take heartbeats at specified intervals and notify on an event in real-time, respectively.
• Topology of devices gives a high-level overview of network architecture.
• Discovery of devices is simple and secure with the use of community strings.
• Details can be added per device or alarm type for actions to be taken to make troubleshooting easier.

• 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.

• NOC
• Data Center/Telecom

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

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.

We are still trying other products, but people still like Datadog. After setting up a dashboard, it's great for monitoring instances on Datadog. Also, the DevOps team had a good time setting up Datadog. It means Datadog was way easier to set up compared to those others.

Other tools I have used are more server/application-centric. CA Spectrum seems to work effectively and efficiently for network devices. Notification delays can be set to grant grace periods in case of network blips or false positives, which occur ALL the time. Other monitoring tools send event notifications immediately and would clear instantly, which while on-call can wake a technician for no reason.

• 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

• Proactive monitoring for networking
• To many times to plan an update