Datadog vs. PaperTrail

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

It is very easy to use. We utilize it to save and show the logs for as many apps as we want. You can use it as an addon on Heroku.

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

• PaperTrail is less expensive than many of its competitors.
• PaperTrail is very easy to set up; you can start collecting logs in no time.
• It is easy to configure email alerts and Slack integrations with PaperTrail.

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

• Interface is aging and in need of a re-write. It's functional, but not all that nice to work with
• While the logs are near-real-time, they could greatly improve the speed at which logs are available in the UI
• Pricing plans are not all that competitive with newer offerings with other companies

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

PaperTrail has become a basic app for me to save and see app logs. It is very easy to use, very intuitive and easy to customize. The feature I like most is that we can use it with several apps at same time.

Incentivized

PaperTrail's live-tailing performance is adequate and searches over the recent history load quickly. Searching over long periods of time can be extremely slow, however.

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

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

I only used Logz.io for a very brief time. It seemed a bit more difficult to setup than Papertrail.

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

• Free plan is sufficient for development and small services, and the paid plans are very cheap at low log volume. For us, the price is right with PaperTrail - though I can't speak to how their pricing compares at very high volumes.
• Adding cloud-logging to your apps can really speed up development and debugging - the impact to engineering productivity cannot be understated.

Incentivized