Datadog vs. F5 BIG-IP

Datadog may be better suited for teams that have a more out-of-the-box infrastructure, on the primary platforms Datadog supports. You may also have better results if you have a bigger team dedicated to devops and/or a bigger budget. We found that trying to adapt it to our use case (small team, .NET on AWS Fargate) wasn't feasible. We continually ran into roadblocks that required us to dig through documentation (and at times, having to figure out some documentation was wrong), go back and forth with support, and in my opinion, waste money on excessive and unintended usages due to opaque pricing models and inaccurate usage reports, as well as broken/non-functional rate sampling controls.

Incentivized

I think it's mostly suited for my company because it has prevented others from phishing into our company account and our user accounts, for example. Then it actually creates another safe because when I have to log in, I just have to connect on my phone to approve or not. So if I don't see that, it's kind of like someone else is trying to log in to my computer.

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's reliable. We've had very little problems with the technology. Performance is always right on. Metrics are great. They come out of it. We'd like to do more probably with it in the future as we start to grow a lot more.

Incentivized

• Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
• I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
• I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame

Incentivized

• Recently we have been deploying F5 web application firewall and we have started the deployment. We have already moved applications out there, but we are not yet to the point wherein I could comment any positive feedback or any negative feedback because we are still going through it, right. But as far as I'm concerned, I don't see any drawbacks or any shortcomings on the F5 product lineup.

Incentivized

Definitely will not revisit after our issues and, in my opinion, poor support.

Incentivized

Stability of product and easy way to have account manager contact. F5 support team is also always available to help with major issues. Last year during the major OS upgrade F5 team and F5 leadership always shared clear information and F5 team was dedicated to help us to have it closed in record time

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

It is a good product to use but right now it is lacking the automation of certificates, management of iRules and automation of certain configuration. Also creating an APM policy from scratch with many APM agents take a long time due to slow load times of the GUI and the need to create everything from scratch every time. It's tough to reuse the configuration.

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

I've supported F5 for three different companies. Our F5 support has been very consistent, regardless who the customer is. F5 technicians are very experienced and provide good support, even when issues are more related to knowledge than they are with the ability of the product to do what you need it to do.

Incentivized

Practical cases and hands on , many hours of training with tipical cases

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

implementation is fine

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

That's the one thing that really stood out. It was a lot easier to use from an administrator standpoint, so I think that's the one thing that really made our team decide to go with this product versus another competitor. Just ease of use.

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

• The F5 BIG-IP has improved all our load balancing needs, we have over 400 LTM VIPs in our environment this all use to be done with DNS round Robin configurations.
• we have created unique APM solutions to support our external customer base

Incentivized