Datadog vs. Graylog

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Datadog
Score 8.3 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
Graylog
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Graylog, headquartered in Houston, offers their eponymous platform for centralized log management that helps users find meaning in data faster so as to take action immediately. Graylog is available via Enterprise and Cloud plans, but also has a Small Business Plan, and an Open (free) plan with limited features.N/A
Pricing
DatadogGraylog
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
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DatadogGraylog
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
DatadogGraylog
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.5 out of 10
SolarWinds Papertrail
SolarWinds Papertrail
Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
SolarWinds Papertrail
SolarWinds Papertrail
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM Instana
IBM Instana
Score 9.0 out of 10
Splunk Log Observer
Splunk Log Observer
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DatadogGraylog
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(22 ratings)
7.8
(7 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(6 ratings)
3.6
(3 ratings)
User Testimonials
DatadogGraylog
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.
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Graylog
For small companies, Graylog is the best solution possible. It's easy to configure and "just works." Above everything else, it's free. The only thing I hold against it is the fact that it's Linux-based. [This] makes sense because Elasticsearch is Linux-based. But Linux adds a layer of complexity that we don't need for something basic as a logging server. I'm pretty sure that we would have had a logging server years earlier if I had to convince quite a few decision-making people to go ahead with it anyway.
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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
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Graylog
  • Graylog does a great job of its core function: log aggregation, retention, and searching.
  • Graylog has a very flexible configuration. The backend for storage is Elasticsearch and MongoDB is used to store the configuration. You have to option to make your configuration as simple as possible by storing everything on one box, or you can scale everything out horizontally by using a cluster of Elasticsearch nodes and MongoDB servers with several Graylog servers pointed to all the necessary nodes.
  • Graylog does a good job of abstracting away a fair portion of Elasticsearch index management (sharding, creation, deletion, rotation, etc).
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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.
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Graylog
  • Support for more log sources
  • Event alerts/emails - Some cases where unable to separate data from multiple clients, and no easy fix
  • API - Limits results to 10,000 and can cause server to lockup on queries that exceed the limit
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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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Graylog
No answers on this topic
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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Graylog
Community support does not give simple straightforward answers; simply search up Graylog Issues and look at some of the responses on the forums. The documentation is your only hope if you are on the free version, as you can NOT purchase only support. The few times I have worked with Graylog Enterprise support they were great though.
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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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Graylog
In terms of log aggregation, the free product fully stacks up with the competitors listed. Full control over the data ingests for flexible configuration. Graylog even better on that front than AlienVault USM because you cannot configure the variable mapping. We haven't used the threat exchange stuff or correlation. But with regex searches, we have created function dashboards that show threat theater pictures of our network based on logs from our firewall.
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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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Graylog
  • Graylog is just less expensive than some other options which meant it fit into our budget otherwise we might not be able to justify a higher cost.
  • Being able to track issues that we normally couldn't track using other tools is a bonus to help us know of any issues we have and can fix before an outage or failure that could potentially cost money.
  • We have had to spend more time than I would like to understand and customize Graylog which has taken time away from other tasks and projects.
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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.