Datadog vs. ExtraHop Performance Platform

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.

Incentivized

One very big use is the ability to resolve performance issues. One example used was with the performance of sql issues. ExtraHop [Performance Platform] gave us the packet tracing ability to see the database was being queried incorrectly. A programmer has written a query that would bring the database information local and one the queries instead of allowing the sql server itself to do the work and push out the information.

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 is very good at making it easy to find root cause for app issues.
• It provides very good stats, graphs, and diagrams of IT utilization.

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

• Some person like me who want to see Extrahop can integrate better with other network analysis tools like Wireshark or TCPdump. The desired functionality I've been looking for is to program a kind of specific criteria to trigger the probe starts to run Wireshark or TCPdump to save the trace of a specific problematic session. Sometimes I want to see the evidence in a packet trace layer rather than just have the warning or error only presented in the dashboard.

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

ExtraHop fits perfectly into the nist security framework to ensure the network is monitored and protected from anomalous behaviors.

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 could be a lot better. Tech support is outstanding.

Incentivized

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

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

We use ExtraHop specifically to monitor network traffic. It does many other things very well also, but it is the best network traffic analysis tool that we currently have in house. The fact that it is agentless also makes it more reliable and not dependent on agents running on devices throughout our enterprise.

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

• Accelerated root cause analysis
• Cut out time passing the hot potato, focused time on resolution
• It's a good tool for change management, helping to transform a reactive culture to one that is more proactive
• Enables early warning and visibility, prompts action before a system goes down

Incentivized