Datadog vs. Sumo Logic

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

SumoLogic is a fantastic log aggregator and analysis tool, a fine alternative to Splunk. Searching is powerful and mostly intuitive and results come fast. If you have application logs in clusters or Kubernetes pods that lose their logs every time they're restarted, Sumo is the solution for you

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

• Sumo Logic allowed for our InfoSec team to ingest logs from our CDN directly, in real-time, instead of massive compressed archives that were sent every two-hours (the only alternative at the time). Sumo Logic had an app for these logs, that allowed us to easily get an immediate payoff from the data, with canned dashboard and saved searches.
• Sumo Logic has a fairly extensive REST API when it comes to log sources, source configurations, dashboard data, searches, etc. Their wiki for the API is usually kept up to date.
• Sumo Logic, during the period of time I had used their product, had added the ability to configure agents via configuration files. This allowed customers to configure their endpoints, and modify the endpoints, with configuration management tools like Chef / Puppet / Salt. Beforehand, the only option was to always make changes either via the web portal or REST API.
• The solutions engineers were extremely helpful, and easily reachable when issues would occur.
• Users at our company found it easy to get started, working on new dashboards, scheduled searches, and alerting. The alerting worked well with our third-party paging tool.

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

• I like the help center, but I think if it had more GUI tools, it could help new users.
• Pulling out data is sometimes hard to read, (Maybe if I knew how to export data better, this would not be an issue for me).
• I would like better know-how on how to create reports that will help our business.

Incentivized

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

Sumo Logic is very powerful but definitely requires some configuration work to get the most out of it. You can get a certification related to this, but it is definitely not something you can just throw together.

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

I would give this rating because I attended a free Sumo Logic training at a WeWork in Chicago. I found the training very useful, and I learned a lot of features that I was not aware of before I went to the training. I like the idea that SumoLogic provides free training seminars. I am certified in level1, and I plan on certifying to level2.

Incentivized

I was satisfied with the implementation, as at the time, it was the best way to implement the product with the available feature sets in Sumo Logic. User creation and management became more of an issue during continued use, instead of it being an issue related to deploying the product in our environment.

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

Sumo Logic works very well out of the gate. For a small business it has given us what we need. I worked at a larger company previously, and we produced so many logs we had to create a custom logging service to handle them all. Cost and availability are big issues when deciding between the different services, whether self maintained and hosted, or provided by another company.

Incentivized

I've assisted several OneLogin customers with partner accounts to Sumo Logic. It has always been pleasant.

• 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

• I can't think of any negative side effects other than it being SO slow sometimes, but compared to Splunk everything is slow
• It's SO much cheaper than Splunk that the time it takes to query information is well worth it
• In the times that we've had Sumo go down or stop logging information, we've found that we'd be absolutely lost without Sumo

Incentivized