Datadog vs. SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server

Datadog works really well with complex microservices architecture like any E-commerce platform which will be having multiple services but they all are interdependent to others so in this scenario Datadog will be best to monitor these as it will show the transactions also between those microservices. If you are using multiple services in your architecture whether it will be cloud services or on prem services Datadog will be the best choice to monitor all those service with in Datadog so that you can see everything in a single place. But if you are having small architecture and few services in that then in that scenario you can use Datadog but it will be little costly as compared to other but obviously the features are very well.

Incentivized

The SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server does what it's supposed to do. It's a bare-bones Syslog Server. If your company is just trying to fulfill security requirements or doesn't need all the advanced features of a product such as Splunk, then Kiwi will work well and not break the bank. Using the tool is very straightforward as there aren't a lot of options outside of just viewing logs.

Incentivized

• 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

• Collection of SNMP traps a reliable and stable collection server for these is crucial to troubleshooting and time to ROS. Kiwi excels at this.
• Easy to install set up and train users on.
• The free version is a good free tool and handy to use for personal labs and other smalle use cases.
• SNMP traps to user readable format is great, sometimes syslog and smnp messages can be hard to interpret and read with out a knowledge of how to do this.

Incentivized

• 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

• Minimalistic; If you're looking for something with analysis features look elsewhere.
• Operating System support is Windows only.
• Some management features cannot be configured via web interface.

Incentivized

Definitely will not revisit after our issues and, in my opinion, poor support.

Incentivized

There is some room for improvement, but the Datadog team sends out updates frequently, and the UI is user-friendly for engineers, with no significant loading issues or region-specific problems. That was one of the key reasons we preferred Datadog; our company has employees worldwide, and it wasn't difficult to transition to the tool.

Incentivized

Kiwi Syslog has the best usability of any syslog server. While not being able to offer the most features, the ones it does have are intuitive and easy to work with. Everything that it has is where you think it should be. If you can't find it in the menus, it doesn't exist.

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

Because the solution is so simple to use and implement, support wasn't very necessary. The one time I did call them to better understand where logs were stored, they were very helpful and friendly. Kiwi has been around for some time and not a lot has changed over the years, so support for it is pretty straightforward and quick.

Incentivized

Documentation was difficult to work through, rollout was catastrophic (completely outage)

Incentivized

Datadog is a more complex but complete solution than any of the other Log Aggregation, monitoring, or general observabilty tools that we have trialed. I found it easier to setup following useful and up-to-date documentation provided directly by Datadog instead of scattered around many blogs or articles. I would love to have my own Grafana + Prometheus expert to setup all the peices we need but you're paying for expertise there instead of an experience with Datadog.

Incentivized

Syslog-ng don't have customer support or technical support .But its a free software and no clarity on limitations ingestion bandwidth. No gui feature and everything should be done from backend. Gui can easily help to start and stop service ,easy to configure. Unlimited technical and customer support . Even when server got shutdown will get on-call or immediate support that will helps a lot to resolve errors

• 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

• SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server has made it easier for me to monitor events on all of my network devices and servers.
• As a small business, we needed something powerful but inexpensive and SolarWinds Kiwi Syslog Server is exactly that.

Incentivized