Datadog vs SolarWinds Loggly

• 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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• Putting our logs in one place and making them searchable. We use AWS, and CloudWatch has always been a little frustrating in this regard (though it has gotten better recently).
• Deriving metrics from our logs. I think log-based metrics is such a good idea because your logs are the ultimate source for truth in regards to what the hell is going on inside your app. I have really loved the simplicity with which I can just count certain statements and call that a metric because just through the normal course of development certain log statements just naturally become a straightforward recording of an event having occurred.
• Alerts. I actually have a few complaints about email alerts, but just the way I was able to set them up so easily has been huge. Since we started using Loggly, there have been at least 3 bugs that Loggly exposed that were frankly very bad. And withoutt Loggly or without a user reporting them, we would have never known they were happening! This is stuff I tried to set up in CloudWatch in various ways, but because of my own ignorance or perhaps the complexity/limitations of CloudWatch (or the complexity of my stack?), I wasn't getting the information that I needed until I was able to just tell Loggly to send me an email whenever the word "error" showed up.

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• User interface could be improved in some areas, looking for host information and the agent install link takes a bit of time.
• Configuration of the agent is generally done via a config file which is a pro and a con. It would be nice to have some UI to configure various agent options.
• Billing isn't entirely straightforward, they could use more reports to figure out the source of your monthly costs.

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• Once the logging limit is exceeded, there are no logs period. Unexpectedly noisy logs often correlate with services misbehaving and potentially leading to disruption. An outage is an awful time to lose visibility into the entire system of apps. Some ways to bridge this gap would be appreciated.
• Filtering by tags is not intuitive in the web interface. You may believe that you are performing the same search and filter as last time since the tags entered are the same, however, this is often not the case. The reliable way to know that you have the same filter is to bookmark the URL. This lack of ease in usability results in devs using Loggly less than they could and implementing logs less effectively during development time (since they don't consider themselves likely to view them anyway).
• Would like to see a way to onboard our less experienced devs to using Loggly effectively.

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• One of our critical production databases went down a couple of weeks back. Just because we had the Datadog monitoring enabled for that database, Datadog sent the alerts to PagerDuty and we were instantly notified via pager and email alert. We could act right away and bring up the database within a few mins.
• Ability to create custom screenboards have allowed us to track the critical and warning alerts in front of our eyes all the time

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• (Positive, actually!) Cost of Acquisition: Loggly is not OpenSource (i.e. Free in this case). Therefore, while you have a cost up front, you have a wealth of support from the people that built it, which can translate into Time savings and/or bringing contractors on-board just for augmentation purposes
• Negative: Loggly covers a lot of the features that other Open Source Projects cover. That being said, it's regulated by supply and demand, and thus it has a certain "desirability" as a commercial (and therefore stable) project. As a result, unless you are an employee working in a company that sees Loggly as a necessary tool, you will probably not be exposed to it on your own
• (Positive): Tagging of information, and filtering of logs makes this product worthwhile from a commercial perspective: You can train your employees, and have them filtering logs in a day. If they get stuck, you don't have to pull internal resources away to support them, you simply open a ticket with Loggly.

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