Datadog vs. Sensu, by Sumo Logic

Datadog can be pricey for larger scale businesses, so it really depends on your use case. For us, we have a small single deployment application and a small developer team, so our costs are mostly reasonable. There are more features than we can explore which can be somewhat overwhelming. It is mostly easy and intuitive to use but for larger scale you may consider rolling your own solutions.

Incentivized

• Well suited for raising pagers when you have count-based metrics.
• Well suited for threshold-based metrics.
• Not well suited for tracking events over the day, since graphs and other visualizations are missing.

Incentivized

• 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

• Unique concept as a "monitoring router" that can tie services together.
• Backward-compatible with Nagios environments.
• More of a DevOps focus than Nagios.

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

• Cannot be solely used for tracking metrics over time.
• Not a very good UI.

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

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

Sensu's customer support was always willing to work with us but never really seemed to learn much from our experiences. I think they get a lot of customers with DevOps IT teams that are willing to put in a lot of elbow grease to get the most of Sensu's architecture. However, despite explaining my continued disappointment with their documentation and the overall flow of the product, I never got much more than a "sorry" and a notice that their documentation was open source if I wanted to contribute to it. The problem, of course, is that you can't document what you don't understand. I'm a former technical writer, so I know that better than most.

Incentivized

It's a one-stop solution for all our needs whereas in other open-source tools, we have an operational overhead to keep and manage the uptime of these tools as well and also manage their versioning, upgrade, and patching cycle. Also if there are any bugs then we have to raise an open source issue and many problems as we have to keep 2 to 3 people aligned to manage the stack.

Incentivized

Have used New Relic and Sematext Cloud for APM and for tracking over days and visualizing the issues. But those are very expensive as compared to Sensu.

Incentivized

• 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

• Standing up the Sensu Go server took very little effort.
• Setting up and maintaining the build processes and deployment logic for Sensu assets and checks was somewhat exhausting and resulted in lower adoption among non-DevOps IT.
• The limited web interface resulted in lower adoption among non-DevOps IT.

Incentivized