Item: Datadog
Rating: 9
Author: Gabriel Samaroo

Overall Satisfaction with Datadog

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The engineering/dev-ops teams use DataDog as the tool of choice for monitoring our applications/servers, and for aggregating logs. All of our applications and micro-services use the DataDog Rest API to send metrics to, so that we can monitor performance and CPU usage, and setup alerts in case any issues arise.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Great UX. Good looking dashboards and advanced graphs.
Simple Rest API allowing integration with basically any service/application. Allows for the creation of a centralized source of data.
Good API documentation and very responsive customer service.
Good pricing model for micro-services. Can handle getting data from many sources without having to pay as much as alternatives.

Cons

Limitation on what you can do with reporting and analytics. If you need to do very advanced mathematical/graphing operations, might need to use data in another BI Tool to accomplish.
Good amount of upfront work to install and configure across your entire application/software stack. Heavy learning curve.
Logging capabilities not as robust as alternatives like Splunk.

Return on Investment

Datadog's pricing model works very well with our software platform, in a much more cost effective way than it's competitors.
The ability to centralize/aggregate data in a single location and set up alerts with thresholds has proven invaluable in catching potential issues, allowing our team to fix small, inexpensive issues before they become large, very expensive issues.
The graphs and dashboards are used by stakeholders to understand key metrics and performance indicators, helping them make informed decisions when running the business.

Alternatives Considered

New Relic, Splunk Cloud, Splunk Enterprise and VictorOps

Datadog has been harder to setup out-of-the-box compared to its alternatives, although it's graphs and dashboards have been more useful. Other tools handle individual tasks better. For example, Splunk has been the best logging tool I've used, and New Relic is great for CPU and browser monitoring, but DataDog is the best-packaged solution. It has the best pricing model when you have many applications/micro-services and once set up, integrates very easily with other tools.

Likelihood to Recommend

Datadog is great when you have a complex software system, with multiple applications and micro-services. If you have the resources to do the upfront work of integrating with your platform(s), it will be a great tool to handle monitoring/alerts. It also has nice features for log aggregation. The graphs and dashboards also make Datadog a useful tool to others, such as Managers and non-Engineers, not only for Dev-Ops and Engineers directly using it. If you want something to use quicker out-of-the-box or don't want to spend any money there are quicker/cheaper options.

Comments

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DataDog: Great Tool for Enterprise Monitoring, Alerts, Metric Aggregation, and Dashboards/Graphs