Item: Datadog
Rating: 7
Author: Matt Steen

Overall Satisfaction with Datadog

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Datadog for monitoring and observability across our org. It gives us visibility into what's really happening when something goes wrong via tracing, and its monitors have alerted us to issues countless times before a customer could complain. We monitor performance via metrics and can dig into specific calls using traces and flame graphs to see where bottlenecks are.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Setting up tracing is incredibly easy and powerful
Log search, especially with subqueries, makes it possible to find a needle in a haystack
Dashboards make it easy to compare data across dimensions

Cons

Building dashboards is often painful - the query syntax, especially for APM, is challenging to navigate. This feels like somewhere where an LLM integration would be incredibly helpful
Specifically, the lack of wildcard search for APM resources makes it hard to gather or view data across a group of related endpoints
The query helper is often too eager to help, opening dropdowns when I don't want them and inserting extra query filters where they aren't wanted or needed.

Return on Investment

By using monitors for new errors, we've reduced the errors to near zero for a growing consumer-facing application. A meaningful percentage of visits were previously ending in failure, but we've been able to work through the errors with the increased visibility
Custom metrics have allowed us to provide excellent customer service to our business customers by analyzing usage patterns over time and helping them use our application more effectively. They really appreciate when we proactively reach out to them about ways to improve their success rate

Usability

Datadog has a steep learning curve, especially when it comes to building a dashboard or searching for something new. The capabilities are impressive, but it's often hard to find them or tweak queries to get exactly the data I want. APM queries are the biggest pain point in my experience.

Key Insights

Do you think Datadog delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

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

Datadog does well at its key use cases of providing visibility into an application across multiple services, via logs, traces, metrics (including custom metrics), and powerful monitoring. The main reason my rating isn't higher is due to some of the UX concerns around APM queries. While it's usually possible to get the data I want, it seems harder than necessary.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Steep learning curve but totally worth it