Datadog vs Prometheus

Datadog and Prometheus are IT service monitoring tools designed to give businesses insight into the performance of their hardware and software stacks. Datadog is a single-pane-of-glass solution with monitoring, alerting, data analysis, and visualization capabilities. Prometheus is a free open-source tool focused solely on monitoring and alerting. On TrustRadius, Datadog is used primarily by mid-sized companies, while Prometheus is primarily used by large enterprises.

Features

Although both Datadog and Prometheus have similar core functionality, their user experience and implementation are significantly different.

Datadog is a professionally-supported product with plenty of visual analysis and quality-of-life features. Users on TrustRadius appreciate that it allows them to monitor performance, manage alerts, add and remove monitored resources, and analyze data from a single centralized application. Its data analysis tools in particular give customers multiple ways to view, manipulate, and understand the metrics generated by Datadog. The platform has a wealth of functionality available, and a wide array of officially-supported extensions add helpful features. A professional support team and strong user community help customers resolve any problems they may encounter.

Prometheus, on the other hand, is a free open-source tool that focuses exclusively on monitoring and alerting. As a standalone application, Prometheus has a simple initial setup. It stores all scraped metrics in a database that can be searched with a query language to retrieve and evaluate performance data. Prometheus is extremely customizable, with several community-supported integrations and the freedom to create and tweak alerting rules as needed.

Limitations

Datadog and Prometheus won’t be the right solution for every business, as they have significantly different user experiences. Make sure you consider the limitations of each platform before committing to one or the other. 

According to reviewers on TrustRadius, Datadog can be overwhelming for new users. Its large array of functionality can be useful, but it can also be intimidating for new users. Overall, the platform requires significant user training and customization. Even experienced users have reported difficulty navigating the platform. Some features and edge cases lack sufficient documentation, necessitating a customer support ticket or a request for help from the community. Although Datadog’s price point is reasonable when compared to licensed competitor software, customers still have to pay per host, per GB of log data, or per log event. For smaller organizations, Datadog may very well be overkill.

In comparison, Prometheus offers a classic open-source experience—for better or for worse. Users must be prepared to write code, create configuration files, and operate without a GUI. New users will also have to spend plenty of time learning how to use Prometheus. Since it is an open-source software with no professional support, users will need to rely on community documentation and support, which may be sparse or take time to get results from. Additionally, Prometheus relies on third-party applications for data visualization and analysis, requiring users to manually configure the dataflow from a monitored application to Prometheus, and then from Prometheus to other software. Finally, Prometheus has no built-in authentication or authorization features, relying on other tools to provide access security.

Pricing

Datadog offers several per-month pricing models designed to adapt to various operation scales and requirements. These models include pricing per host, per million log events, per function, per GB of analyzed log files, and per session. For more details on the available plans and pricing, refer to the Datadog pricing page.

Prometheus is open-source and can be downloaded for free.