Datadog vs. IBM Cloudability vs. IBM Kubecost

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 don't have much exposure to the tool. I mean, I'm relatively new to using it as a platform, but I haven't really seen the benefit, especially with the actual renewal talks at the company. I'm not seeing what AWS native solutions are, how probability improves on that as opposed to just using AWS and just, I don't know. I'm not seeing the benefit, at least in my eyes.

Incentivized

Kubecost is very useful tool for organizations looking to manage their cost for their kubernetes environment. its a well suited tool for organizations looking to expand their kubernetes environment or start their kubernetes journey. Having a tool like this is very useful for not only the users but for leadership to manage cost and overall management of their environment

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

• We are able to integrate multiple sources of data to have a comprehensive view of our spend.
• We are able to get more detailed insights via container dashboard for kubernetes spend
• A unified platform to manage overall cloud spend along with related FinOps spend

Incentivized

• Show namespace level cost and usage
• Allow rightisizibg At namespace level
• Show effectiveness of current resources allocation

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

• For me, it is a lot of anomaly detection and I think there's a lot of improvement that can be made to show anomalies that happen over time because if it's just day to day or week to week, you may not see the change. But if you see the trend over a period of time, show me something that has grown 40%, 50% over the past three months and maybe you can do those things and we just haven't figured them out yet. So we are very new to the product, but I think anomaly detection for me is one of the bigger things.

Incentivized

• I think there is room for improvement in IBM Kubecost if you Streamline IBM Kubecost more with AWS cost explorer

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Cloudability has been one solution for almost all of our FinOps needs. Except for Data transfer costs, we have covered all use cases and have made significant savings across our cloud infrastructure. Reporting has provided management a deeper analysis into their spending and helped them forecast their budgets for next year

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

I gave the IBM Cloudability a 7/10 because it is good, but it could improve in some places. It is easy to get data uploaded and ready to view, but it is only up to a certain point in time, and not live data. As for how it looks, the interface is good for viewing, however navigation could be a little better, maybe supported with a roadmap.

Incentivized

While Kubecost is very critical tool, providing useful information about your organization's kubernets cost patterns, it could use additional features like better integration with other IBM tools. Having the ability to incorporate other IBM tools will be helpful for users and leadership as well as increase overall awareness of what other Products IBM provides.

Incentivized

Only been 1 or 2 occaisions when not available, in 3 years

Incentivized

Afternoons tend to be a little slower, due to US traffic I assume

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

While there have been few support cases where the experience was good. But in multiple support cases it's firstly delayed and even after weeks or months of time, team is not able to provide us with the RCA of the issue. All they are claiming is the issue is now fixed which I still see coming back after few days or weeks as we've never identified and addressed the root cause.

Incentivized

Training was adequate, but the real learning begins when you start using the product, like most things. All major functions were covered so as an entry point, was a good introduction to the product. The training pace was good as well, the areas were covered in decent depth, without being too much of an information overload.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Within months

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

Before Apptio we extensively used the cloud native and in house automated and developed cost optimization tool using python , powershell and leveraging the various cloud native services like AWS systems manager , Azure Functions and Azure automation run books.

Incentivized

Namespace cost, usage and efficiency data and ability to optimize for k8 containers

Incentivized

I wasn't personally involved, but all dealings with Apptio have been easy

Incentivized

Works as designed

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

• Apptio Cloudability has enabled us to charge back 100% of our cloud spend to our business users and on an automated basis through the use of ApptioOne
• Apptio Cloudability's transparency and metrics have enabled us to save millions of dollars in cloud spend across our user base.

Incentivized

• Cost savings
• cost monitoring
• budget control

Incentivized