Datadog vs SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

• APIs, the ability to interact with the data we pull into data dog is key. We port the information over to Servicenow, so the ability to pull everything into DataDog, then Servicenow, is a key component of our success here at Wayfair.
• Simple Interface - clean, useful, effective. Allows users to use DataDog for one reason, get work done.
• Lightweight agent on hosts

Read full review

• I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
• I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
• Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
• Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.

Read full review

• User interface could be improved in some areas, looking for host information and the agent install link takes a bit of time.
• Configuration of the agent is generally done via a config file which is a pro and a con. It would be nice to have some UI to configure various agent options.
• Billing isn't entirely straightforward, they could use more reports to figure out the source of your monthly costs.

Read full review

• We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact.

Read full review

• One of our critical production databases went down a couple of weeks back. Just because we had the Datadog monitoring enabled for that database, Datadog sent the alerts to PagerDuty and we were instantly notified via pager and email alert. We could act right away and bring up the database within a few mins.
• Ability to create custom screenboards have allowed us to track the critical and warning alerts in front of our eyes all the time

Read full review

• Every business I have worked with who have adopted VMAN has seen an efficiency improvement. This means that they are able to run more guests on the same hardware, leading to an increased time before requiring further CAPEX for additional capacity.
• Performance benefits, via heeding the recommendations within VMAN, are not to be underestimated. Once VMAN has enough metrics on your estate, it can quickly advise you which guests need more compute, but more importantly which ones are over-provisioined, and can have CPU/memory reduced! This leads to increased capacity.

Read full review