Datadog vs. Percepio Tracealyzer

Where Datadog is good: - Real-time Visibility During Incidents: During high-severity incidents, Datadog dashboards, coupled with real-time logging and APM traces, provide immediate insight into system health and enable fast triage. For example, we’ve used trace ID correlation between logs and APM to quickly identify downstream service failures due to network degradation during a major outage. - Service Ownership at Scale: With over 50 engineering teams, providing self-service monitoring is essential. We use Datadog monitors, SLO dashboards, and templates so teams can track their own service health without reinventing the wheel. Tagging and RBAC features help us scope data access appropriately. Where Datadog can improve: While Datadog’s logging capabilities are powerful, storing all application logs in Datadog can become cost-prohibitive at high volumes.

Incentivized

This is a perfect tool to debug complex bugs in your system, especially in regards to inter-task communication. It is also a great tool for beginners, as the documentation is accessible and the support given by the company is excellent

• Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
• Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
• Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
• DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
• Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.

Incentivized

• Great visualization
• Sometimes awkward views (vertical vs horizontal)

• 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

• It's not always easy to include/integrate Tracealyzer in the OS build. It would be nice to have a simple install/plug n play method for our target.
• Sometimes, the .bin files from Tracealyzer don't always work and we don't know why

Datadog's user interface is quite friendly and easy to navigate. With menus clearly categorized, and ability to bookmark important dashboards, one can easily find what they're looking for. For dashboards, ability to move and resize visualizations and group them, is really helpful to organize dashboards. Automatic suggestions from Datadog for important visualizations based on the metrics and logs would provide another level of ease of use.

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

We are still trying other products, but people still like Datadog. After setting up a dashboard, it's great for monitoring instances on Datadog. Also, the DevOps team had a good time setting up Datadog. It means Datadog was way easier to set up compared to those others.

Incentivized

While we started using uCOSIII for our simpler microcontroller products, we also use QNX on more complex targets (full microprocessors) and it is a much more complex platform offering event tracing, memory tracing, and performance measures that are extremely good and integrated. More importantly these tools are fully integrated without any code changes. Tracealyzer is not integrated as much into uCOSIII like QNX's tools, debugger, etc. But, going thru the manual work of adding Tracealyzer to the build, it did help us get to a shippable product.

• 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

• Positive: We were able to find some thread priority issues with Tracealyzer.
• Positive: we were able to see timing of events in the sw/hw that we couldn't otherwise see.