Datadog vs. Grafana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Datadog
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$0
Up to 5 hosts
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$0
Pricing
DatadogGrafana
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Up to 5 hosts
Log Management
$1.27
Per Million Log Events
Standard
$15/host
Up to 500 hosts
Infrastructure
$15.00
Per Host Per Month
APM
$31.00
Per Host Per Month
Enterprise
Custom
500+ hosts
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DatadogGrafana
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DatadogGrafana
Considered Both Products
Datadog
Chose Datadog
It's a one-stop solution for all our needs whereas in other open-source tools, we have an operational overhead to keep and manage the uptime of these tools as well and also manage their versioning, upgrade, and patching cycle. Also if there are any bugs then we have to raise an …
Grafana
Chose Grafana
Grafana has a direct plugin to Icinga monitoring solution and allowed for easy configuration for us. At the time of implementation, other services did not have such an integration. As we already had a very customized and heavily introduced monitoring solution in place, we …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
DatadogGrafana
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.0
5 Ratings
5% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings6.45 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings10.05 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings7.65 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
7.3
4 Ratings
9% below category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings6.84 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings6.24 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings8.44 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.7
4 Ratings
3% above category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings7.84 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings8.44 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings9.44 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
7.7
4 Ratings
6% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings8.24 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings8.64 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings7.04 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings6.82 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DatadogGrafana
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.7 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 9.3 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
GitLab
GitLab
Score 8.6 out of 10
Mathematica
Mathematica
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprises
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 8.9 out of 10
Sigma
Sigma
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DatadogGrafana
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(22 ratings)
10.0
(5 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DatadogGrafana
Likelihood to Recommend
Datadog
DataDog Is well suited to all of the Infrastructure Monitoring Solutions, DB monitoring, and other Network monitoring also. It's not well suited because it cannot give perfect Infrastructure recommendations for our use case but also For example: If we are using AWS DB to monitor performance insights then Datadog is less effective there because AWS gives very niche recommendations.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
If I was starting over on an Observability platform, Grafana would be my number 1 choice due to the flexibility and ability to act as a single platform either on its own or combining multiple data sources. The trick however, is that it can be fairly complex to learn and setup, so time is needed to make it a successful implementation. There is a level of cognitive load required
Read full review
Pros
Datadog
  • 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
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
Read full review
Cons
Datadog
  • We had a couple "integrations" that had some issues during setup, but Support addressed them very quickly
  • Unnecessary alerts about DataDog components...by the time I see them, they're almost always also fixed
  • I wish there was a DataDog mobile app that would have dedicated alerts (configurable per alert to override Do Not Disturb setting) instead of relying on emails notifications that could be overlooked in the midst of many incoming emails around the same time.
Read full review
Grafana Labs
  • There are some settings which we can't configure from UI (Web Console).
  • We've open[ed] up configuration files in command line text editors and manually do the settings e.g. LDAP/SSO configuration.
  • In terms of visualization, it's best, but it doesn't support log analysis otherwise it could destroy business of all other visualization tools.
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Usability
Datadog
The user interface is quite intuitive with the exception of the network map. As a deployer of software, it is trivial to setup.
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Grafana Labs
It is infinitely flexible. If you can imagine it, Grafana can almost certainly do it. Usability may be in the eye of the beholder however, as there is time needed to curate the experience and get the dashboards customized to how it makes sense to you. I know one thing they are working on are more templates, based on data sources
Read full review
Support Rating
Datadog
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.
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Grafana Labs
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Datadog
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.
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Grafana Labs
Grafana blows Nagios out of the water when it comes to customization. The ability to feed almost any data source makes it very versatile and the cost is great.
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Return on Investment
Datadog
  • Visibility into website issues and performance problems has improved our company communication.
  • Handling and detecting site issues faster has improved customer satisfaction and retention.
  • Configuration of the Datadog site can take a bit of time and we lost a bit of developer time during that process.
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Grafana Labs
  • Time-consuming reports reduced
  • Spotting trends in services
  • Preventive maintenance
Read full review
ScreenShots

Datadog Screenshots

Screenshot of Out-of-the-box and easily customizable monitoring dashboards.Screenshot of Datadog is built to give visibility across teams. You can discuss issues in-context with production data, annotate changes and notify your team, see who responded to that alert before, and remember what was done to fix it.Screenshot of Datadog seamlessly unifies traces, metrics, and logs—the three pillars of observability.Screenshot of Collect monitoring data from across your entire stack with Datadog's 400+ built-in integrations.Screenshot of Datadog's Service Map decomposes your application into all its component services and draws the observed dependencies between these services in real timeScreenshot of Centralize log data from any source.