Datadog vs GitLab

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.

Gitlab is a good platform for collaboration with the team, version control, and optimized way to handle the modifications in the project. GitLab is less appropriate in some cases, though it has a lot of options for integration, new users find it difficult to integrate; there is also room for improvement.

• 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

• The way they have managed to provide the version management aspect using git with project setup and users is mesmerising cause there's no product out there that gives this freely.
• Continuous updates and hearing what users need is what the product engineers at GitLab are doing best. They come back to you with exactly what you need every while.
• Quality features, Latest tech integrations have made the end-to-end solution very flexible and agile.
• CI/CD tools implementation with pipelines and deployment strategies is just making the job for Infra teams smoother.

• 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.

• Sometimes, it is really challenging to manage conflicts when a lot of merge requests are coming for multiple separate branches to the main branch.
• One area of improvement for the software, is sometimes, the interface can work slower
• A few times, we have faced difficulties testing CI builds locally.

Gitlab is the best in its segment. They have a free version, they have open-source software, they provide a good service with their SaaS product, they are a fully-remote company since the beginning (which means they are fully distributed and have forward-thinking IMO). I would certainly recommend them to everyone.

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

The web console management is superior and I would have given Gitlab a 10, but sometimes it is hard to find documentation about a configuration setting in the gitlab.rb configuration file. As we move everything to code that means moving our CVS tools to code as well - and Gitlab to code. The usability of Gitlab from the end user's perspective is superior and the usability from the operations team is very good and getting better but there could be a little improvement in the gitlab.rb config file layout and documentation.

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.

At this point, I do not have much experience with Gitlab support as I have never had to engage them. They have documentation that is helpful, not quite as extensive as other documentation, but helpful nonetheless. They also seem to be relatively responsive on social media platforms (twitter) and really thrived when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft

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.

We have a small custom code development group. We only needed a basic entry-level code management repository. Gitlab meets our needs and is very price advantageous compared to others on the market. We also needed a system that is easy to administer and easy to grant access to our limited-size user base. Gitlab does what we need and gives the necessary flexibility for application support, user administration, and code/version control needs to be required.

• 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

• We are moving towards Gitlab only as our SCM & CI tool. So it would be an alternative to Jenkins. Saving our licensing cost there.
• We have also stopped using Confluence & using Gitlab for our documentation purposes. Reducing cost there as well.