Datadog vs. Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Datadog
Score 8.6 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.
$18
per month per host
Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management is a service available on Microsoft's Azure, that provides insights into vulnerabilities, risks, and exposures for web-based resources. It defines an organization’s unique internet-exposed attack surface and discovers unknown resources to help users proactively manage security posture.
$0.01
per day per asset
Pricing
DatadogMicrosoft Defender External Attack Surface Management
Editions & Modules
Log Management
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Infrastructure
$15.00
per month (billed annually) per host
Standard
$18
per month per host
Enterprise
$27
per month per host
DevSecOps Pro
$27
per month per host
APM
$31.00
per month (billed annually) per host
DevSecOps Enterprise
$41
per month per host
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DatadogMicrosoft Defender External Attack Surface Management
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsDiscount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DatadogMicrosoft Defender External Attack Surface Management
Features
DatadogMicrosoft Defender External Attack Surface Management
Threat Intelligence
Comparison of Threat Intelligence features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management
9.7
1 Ratings
19% above category average
Network Analytics00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Threat Recognition00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Vulnerability Classification00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Automated Alerts and Reporting00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Threat Analysis00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Threat Intelligence Reporting00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Automated Threat Identification00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Vulnerability Management Tools
Comparison of Vulnerability Management Tools features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management
9.4
1 Ratings
13% above category average
IT Asset Realization00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Authentication00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Configuration Monitoring00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Web Scanning00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Vulnerability Intelligence00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
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User Ratings
DatadogMicrosoft Defender External Attack Surface Management
Likelihood to Recommend
9.4
(55 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.2
(34 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DatadogMicrosoft Defender External Attack Surface Management
Likelihood to Recommend
Datadog
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.
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Microsoft
Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management is particularly well-suited for discovering, inventorying, and continuously monitoring the external attack surface, especially in environments with heavy Microsoft adoption. It is less suitable as a standalone solution for internal scanning, real-time attack detection, automated remediation, or advanced application testing. Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management es especialmente adecuado para descubrir, inventariar y monitorear continuamente la superficie de ataque externa, sobre todo en entornos con fuerte adopción de Microsoft. Es menos adecuado como solución única para escaneo interno, detección de ataques en tiempo real, remediación automática o pruebas avanzadas de aplicaciones. Parts of this review were originally written in Spanish and have been translated into English using a third-party translation tool. While we strive for accuracy, some nuances or meanings may not be perfectly captured.
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Pros
Datadog
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • Lack of visibility of external assets
  • Reduction of the risk of external attacks
  • Falta de visibilidad de activos externos
  • Reducción del riesgo de ataques externos
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Cons
Datadog
  • 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
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Microsoft
  • Asset Attribution and Ownership Clarity
  • Risk Prioritization and Business Context
  • Noise and False Positives
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Likelihood to Renew
Datadog
Definitely will not revisit after our issues and, in my opinion, poor support.
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Usability
Datadog
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.
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Microsoft
We rate Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management’s overall usability as 10 out of 10 because it delivers a strong balance between depth of capability and ease of use, particularly within organizations already operating in the Microsoft security ecosystem.
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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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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Datadog
Documentation was difficult to work through, rollout was catastrophic (completely outage)
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Microsoft
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Datadog
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.
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Microsoft
Because Microsoft Defender External Attack Surface Management is part of the broader Microsoft Defender family (including Defender XDR, Entra ID, Azure Security, Sentinel, etc.), it:
Shares identity, endpoint, and threat context across tools
Reduces the need for custom integrations or connectors
Works in a “single pane of glass” experience for SOC analysts
Why it matters:
Organizations already invested in Microsoft security tools gain greater contextual insight and lower operational overhead.
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Return on Investment
Datadog
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • Reduced Business Risk from Unknown External Assets
  • Operational Efficiency and Cost Avoidance
  • Faster Risk Identification During Change Events
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ScreenShots

Datadog Screenshots

Screenshot of the out-of-the-box and customizable monitoring dashboards.Screenshot of Datadog's collaboration features, where users can discuss issues in-context with production data, annotate changes and notify their teams, see who responded to that alert before, and discover what was done to fix it.Screenshot of where Datadog unifies traces, metrics, and logs—the three pillars of observability.Screenshot of some of Datadog's 400+ built-in integrations.Screenshot of Datadog's Service Map, which decomposes an application into all its component services and draws the observed dependencies between these services in real timeScreenshot of centralized log data, pulled from any source.