Item: Datadog
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Datadog

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our organization, Datadog is a core observability tool used across the platform and application teams to ensure the reliability, performance, and scalability of our systems. As a platform team, we leverage Datadog to provide standardized monitoring, alerting, and visibility for both infrastructure and services used by multiple engineering teams.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Metrics dashboards
APM
Service health metrics

Cons

The search dialog and conventions around naming services, resources, etc.

Return on Investment

BAD: Datadog’s UI and feature set can be overwhelming for new users.
GOOD: With self-service dashboards and alerting templates provided by the platform team, product teams can monitor and troubleshoot their own services without needing deep infrastructure expertise or involving SREs for every issue.

Usability

The UI is overwhelming, and a lot of futures are thus underutilized by our engineers

Key Insights

Do you think Datadog delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Datadog's feature set?

Yes

Did Datadog live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Datadog go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Datadog again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Comments

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Great tool and industry standard