Datadog vs. Retrace (legacy)

If I want to see what customers are doing wrong in their sessions, we can do that easily. On the other hand, if we want to know the payload in the API calls, that is the area where Datadog can improve.

Incentivized

If I need to change a logo design on the invoice, the new logo is slightly larger or smaller so the type below the logo is in a different area than before. In this case, you would need to load the new version of the document into APM Plus and redo the mapping of the field areas to properly grab the information needed to process the document. Without doing this, the document could fail or go to the wrong archive based on the fields.

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

• Integration of performance management with log management so you get the parameters sent
• In-line log and error data in trace
• Integration of error and log data, so in one click you can see all the logs recorded when an error was thrown
• Very reasonably priced

• 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

• To set up the fields that APM Plus monitors, you need to map each field area on each document.
• APM Plus could use a way to link the documents back into the finance or business software so you can find the document under the PO, Sales Order, Invoice, etc.
• APM Plus setup is only for the professionals. There are many areas that need tweaking on setup, having a better default setup would lessen the learning curve to set it up for use.

Incentivized

Its a one stop solution for most processes and does reduce cost overall. This does in turn help teams communicate in a much more efficient way, also RUM is a game changer for any quality product; we use RUM alot for debugging and reverse engineering issues. Reports and coverage has been a plus, it all has helped us a lot in our processes.

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

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

Incentivized

In terms of usability, I’ve found Datadog significantly more approachable and powerful compared to Elasticsearch, especially for day-to-day operational monitoring. Datadog offers a much more cohesive, user-friendly interface out of the box, with built-in support for metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, and dashboards—all tightly integrated. In contrast, Elasticsearch often felt barebones and required considerable setup and additional tooling (like Kibana or Logstash) to reach the same level of functionality.
While Elasticsearch is excellent for high-volume log ingestion and full-text search, it lacks the depth of features and real-time visualization capabilities that Datadog provides natively. The query language in Datadog is also quite usable and comparable for my needs—mainly filtering and aggregating logs and metrics—without needing to learn Elasticsearch's more complex DSL. Overall, Datadog saves our team time and effort, whereas Elasticsearch often felt like building a monitoring system from scratch. The all-in-one nature of Datadog, despite its complexity, is ultimately more efficient and scalable for our use case.

Incentivized

It is a very impressive tool which doesn't overwhelm you with unnecessary data. They have combination of tools that haven't seen by any other company which makes it a very powerful tool

• 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

• APM Plus has freed up users from having to manually attach documents to each place they are sending it. APM Plus will do it automatically.
• APM Plus provides a searchable archive to re-visit sent documents with customers and vendors. Having to reprint a document you risk the potential that something has changed since it was last printed.
• APM Plus does need IT staff for adjustments and to review sending problems. Not for an average user.

Incentivized