Datadog vs. Grafana Loki

Datadog can be pricey for larger scale businesses, so it really depends on your use case. For us, we have a small single deployment application and a small developer team, so our costs are mostly reasonable. There are more features than we can explore which can be somewhat overwhelming. It is mostly easy and intuitive to use but for larger scale you may consider rolling your own solutions.

Incentivized

Grafana Loki can compile data logs for easy exploration of a service and enable quick troubleshooting and error tracing for engineers who may not have deeper access. However, Loki is dependent on the service logging complexity, which, depending on the logger, may not be robust enough and limit the value offered.

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

• Access to many open-source dashboards, access to add many data-sources to gather and visualize data from.
• Grafana Loki does well gathering of logs from various data-sources, we can also filter the logs based on our needs.
• One stop solution for all the logs and monitoring.

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

• Learning curve is very steep
• Longer term log insight is a challenge
• Very easy on AWS, integration with other systems can be more of a challenge

Incentivized

There is some room for improvement, but the Datadog team sends out updates frequently, and the UI is user-friendly for engineers, with no significant loading issues or region-specific problems. That was one of the key reasons we preferred Datadog; our company has employees worldwide, and it wasn't difficult to transition to the tool.

Incentivized

Grafana Loki makes accessing and viewing service logs easy for engineers who may not be familiar with going into service. However, useability can be limited if engineers are unaware of what the queries should look like or where in the service to direct Loki to look for logging.

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

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 open source issue and many problems as we have to keep 2 to 3 people aligned to manage the stack.

Incentivized

First and foremost if Grafana Loki is based on CNCF open source projects so organizations can get freedom to choice to configure it at your own other main thing is Grafana Loki is totally free of cost and we can deploy it on our infrastructure. On compared with other managed services like Datadog, New Relic it is very expensive and we also don't have much control on the tools we 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

• Company wide (realtime) insights in complex aws setup is great
• Dashboarding options are easily set up

Incentivized