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Datadog is a cloud-based monitoring and analytics platform used by organizations of all sizes, from startups to enterprises, to optimize the performance and reliability of their applications and infrastructure. Its comprehensive real-time observability and monitoring features help teams gain valuable insights into the performance, security, and availability of their infrastructure and applications. This Datadog review will break down the popular developer tool in terms of its features, pricing, advantages, and disadvantages. It will also list some of the top Datadog alternatives if you find it unsuitable for your software development team’s needs.
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Overview of Datadog
Developers, IT operations, and DevOps teams looking to gain insights into the health and performance of their infrastructure and applications rely on Datadog for its comprehensive monitoring and analytics capabilities. The popular cloud-based developer tool excels in collecting and analyzing data from multiple sources to provide real-time monitoring, visualization, and alerting that helps teams detect and fix problems faster, maintain security and reliability, and optimize performance. Datadog also features over 600 built-in integrations for added functionality in various departments, such as automation, collaboration, configuration, deployment, issue tracking, monitoring, source control, and more.
Features of Datadog
Datadog offers a wide range of features with separate products created to fit various development team’s needs. Some of its highlighted products cover crucial categories like:
- Application performance monitoring
- Logging and log management
- Infrastructure cost reduction and monitoring
- Security via vulnerability management
- Error tracking
- Software delivery CI/CD pipelines
- Workflow automation
- Incident management
- Integrations with 600 developer tools
Developers can use Datadog’s application performance monitoring to spot and fix issues faster, optimize resource consumption, collaborate with team members to improve end-user experiences, and enhance application security and performance. The tool’s application performance capabilities also include database and universal service monitoring, data stream monitoring, and a continuous profiler that spots memory, CPU, and IO bottlenecks in detail to minimize infrastructure costs and end-user latency.
Datadog offers modern log management and analytics with multiple features like its sensitive data scanner, audit trail, and observability pipelines. Infrastructure is another department covered by Datadog’s wide range of products and capabilities. The programmer tool can monitor your infrastructure, network performance, network devices, and containers, plus offer end-to-end serverless monitoring and cloud cost management services.
In terms of security, Datadog provides application vulnerability management, application security management, cloud security management, and cloud SIEM. The latter offers real-time threat detection across security and operational logs. Datadog’s digital experience capabilities include error tracking, session replay, synthetic monitoring, and mobile/browser real-user monitoring. Its software delivery features include CI visibility to help streamline CI/CD workflows and continuous testing to ship features confidently. Datadog also offers time-saving workflow automation and automated incident management to minimize manual processes and context switching. And for added convenience, Datadog has over 600 built-in integrations with popular developer tools for collaboration, configuration, automation, alerting, compliance, testing, tracing, source control, orchestration, issue tracking, monitoring, and more.
Datadog Pricing
Instead of offering all-in-one pricing plans for its comprehensive capabilities, Datadog breaks down its pricing based on the specific functionality or features you desire. This may be a downside for some development teams seeking more bang for their buck, or a positive for others who only want to pay for what they need.
Datadog has separate pricing plans for infrastructure monitoring, log management, application performance monitoring, database monitoring, mobile app testing and monitoring, real user monitoring, network monitoring, application security management, incident management, application vulnerability management workflow automation, CI visibility, continuous testing, and more. As an example, Datadog’s application performance monitoring is offered via the following pricing plans:
- APM: Starts at $31 per host, per month.
- APM Pro: Starts at $35 per host, per month.
- APM Enterprise: Starts at $40 per host, per month.
- APM DevSecOps: Starts at $36 per host, per month.
- APM DevSecOps Pro: Starts at $40 per host, per month.
- APM DevSecOps Enterprise: Starts at $45 per host, per month.
Datadog offers volume discounts and a free trial for many of its plans. See all of the details for Datadog’s pricing plans, including what features are offered in each.
Advantages of Datadog
Advantages of using Datadog for your monitoring, analytics, and other development needs include:
- Clean interface
- Versatility – has many features for developer workflows
- Excellent visualizations
- Highly scalable
Datadog’s user interface is intuitive, clean, and modern, making it easy to adapt to, even for beginners. The developer tool is highly versatile and offers something for everyone, including monitoring, testing, automation, log management, and more. Its dashboards also offer superb visualization for project managers looking to gain instant insights into their projects’ progress. Lastly, Datadog is highly scalable and can adapt to development teams’ growing needs.
Disadvantages of Datadog
While Datadog has several strengths or advantages, it also has some weaknesses or disadvantages with room for improvement, such as:
- Cost for separate features
- Documentation is lacking
- Customer support could be better
As mentioned, some developers may like that Datadog separates its pricing plans according to the features you desire, which results in only paying for what you need or use. However, this may not be ideal for teams seeking all-in-one functionality from a developer tool, such as automation, monitoring, log management, etc. Once you pay separately for such features and try to scale, Datadog can become expensive and out of reach for development teams with limited budgets.
Another Datadog gripe is that its documentation is limited. Combine that with less-than-stellar customer support, and you may find yourself seeking a monitoring and analytics tool with better resources and support.
Alternatives to Datadog
Datadog excels in many areas as a monitoring and analytics tool. Its clean and modern interface is a joy to use, the dashboards offer superb visualization, and Datadog is scalable and versatile, with enough features to satisfy most teams’ needs. However, Datadog does have some weaknesses, such as documentation and support that some may feel is lacking. Its per-feature pricing structure can get pricey, too, especially for teams seeking multiple capabilities from the cloud-based tool. If such disadvantages seem like too much to overcome, try the Datadog alternatives listed below.
ManageEngine Applications Manager
ManageEngine is an award-winning application performance monitoring and observability tool. The Datadog alternative is highly scalable and offers comprehensive features to ensure that your systems and apps are working as intended. The ManageEngine Applications Manager is a specialized product that helps detect and fix issues with applications, databases, cloud platforms, virtual systems, end-users, and more. It is a popular solution for organizations of all sizes looking to automate and optimize their DevOps and IT processes, offer improved user experiences, and generate better business outcomes.
SolarWinds
SolarWinds is a platform that offers several specialized products under its umbrella for observability, network management, IT security and service management, systems management, database management, and application management. SolarWinds’ application management tool offers application, cloud, and SaaS performance monitoring, tracing, and metrics in one package. It also provides enhanced visualization, log management, analytics, alerting, and synthetic and real-user monitoring to accelerate troubleshooting and reporting and ensure a solid user experience.
Dynatrace
Dynatrace is a Datadog alternative known for its all-in-one functionality, solid alerting, reliable customer support, and AI-powered analytics. The full-stack monitoring tool offers real-time insights into application performance, infrastructure, and user experience. Also, it offers added functionality in the form of synthetic monitoring, application security, automation, and more.
Final Thoughts on Datadog
Datadog is a versatile and highly scalable monitoring and analytics platform with a clean interface and superb dashboards that can help your team gain valuable insights to enhance the performance and reliability of your applications and infrastructure. The developer tool does have some downsides, though, such as limited documentation and support, plus pricing that could be too high for teams with limited budgets. If you find that Datadog is not the ideal monitoring and analytics tool for your needs, try one of the above alternatives that may be a better fit.
