Datadog vs. LiveAction

As per my experience, Datadog is best suited for complex, cloud-native environments where unified observability is critical, as it integrates seamlessly with AWS and Azure. Moreover, it provides deep visibility into latency and error rates. Datadog pricing is less appropriate for Startups with a tight budget and for organizations needing advanced incident management.

Incentivized

From a packet tracing standpoint, it was easy to setup and analyze an issue we were having with eigrp errors between 2 data centers. Took a few minutes to stand up on both sides and compare the traffic to determine hellos weren't being sent. On the other spectrum, had it had the analytics of such products as Extrahop, it could have recognized and alerted us of an internal DNS attack we had.

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

• Network QOS Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation
• Network L2/L3 Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation
• Network Security Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation

Incentivized

• In my experience, .NET Tracing Agent caused severe and untraceable performance issues
• In my opinion, usage and billing structures were opaque and surprising
• In my experience, documentation was incomplete, contradicting or sometimes completely wrong, even for common infrastructure (AWS Fargate)
• I feel support was unhelpful at times, and bounced us back and forth to other teams
• In my opinion, multiple methods of sample rate control were ineffective, adding to excessive usage and cost

Incentivized

• I use it primarily as a monitoring tool from a security standpoint, so one complaint is that the filter creation process takes a little time to learn.
• In the digital days of printing less, I do still need to print network diagrams for compliance documentation and some of the larger network diagrams documents do not print easily.
• I wish the network connection lines were easier to see. They are typically very light and you have to drill down to see them more clearly.

Incentivized

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

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

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

Can't really rate this, we never had to call support. The product wasn't complicated to setup and learn. We have a high level of network knowledge so the product was self-explanatory.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

There is not any other product that does exactly what LiveAction does. Some come about halfway close, like scrutinizer by Plixer. However, there is a gap with that product as it doesn't give proper quality of service recommendations, or to update l2/l3 configs to head off problems. Plixer's scrutinizer product costs about the same. It was a no-brainer to pick LiveAction.

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

• Real time insight to network issues whether security related or not.
• Great reporting features for executives.

Incentivized