Datadog vs. RedFlag

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

RedFlag is extremely helpful in all sorts of emergencies. Whether it's a fire, natural disaster, inclement weather, active shooter, or even a cyber attack, this tool can be used for emergency notifications during all these situations. It can also be used for internal communication. You can send out notifications based on location through geotargeting, message groups together, or have one-on-one communication too. It's a great tool for making business decisions as well. You can use its polling feature for the same.

• 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

• Inform people of critical situations
• Gain feedback and insights

• 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

• Integration with pagers for communication. It’s not a big concern as only a few employees have requested for it. However, it’d help if RedFlag can implement that as well. I’m pretty sure they’ll; they keep coming up with updates regularly.
• Would love to see RedFlag go completely global.

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

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

The support team for RedFlag is amazing. They are always there to address my needs and my dedicated account person is always working to help me. I think this is a differentiator for the company.

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 found the team at RedFlag to be much more responsive and the features were more in line with what I needed. I also found the pricing to be much more in-line with my budget. It was the right solution for me.

• 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 as it has helped us reduce our emergency response time drastically. It’s also streamlined our internal communication and we’ve been able to reduce communication gaps to a great extent.
• Increased productivity due to ease of communication and quick decision making.