Datadog Enterprise (Container Agent)

Datadog 's main use case is end-to-end monitoring that helps check problems across infrastructure, application, database, security, and logs.

For example, when checking a problem with a mobile application such as an error from a user hitting a transaction, we check from the client-side mobile device and also from the back end for the API to see if there is latency or an error that triggers the problem. There may be an issue on the database, such as a locking query or high latency on query performance. For infrastructure, if the application is slow, it may be impacted on infrastructure monitoring by CPU and memory consumption.

Datadog  is a powerful observability tool that allows us to correlate and see problems on the infrastructure or application side. In an incident war room, we can see the correlation and the detailed root cause of the problem across real user monitoring, application, database, and infrastructure.

Datadog has positively impacted our organization because our customers are very happy using it. With silo monitoring, where infrastructure has separate monitoring, application has another, and cloud has another, it becomes tricky and complex. We cannot correlate the silo monitoring, and pricing is complicated. With Datadog, we can centralize and use one observability tool for monitoring all components across all features or modules, unifying the monitoring process.

Regarding specific outcomes, I observe that tools with Datadog's capabilities enable us to quickly achieve mean time to detect problems. We can specifically check the root cause analysis of issues from the infrastructure, application, database, or security sides. Mean time to resolve is improved with Datadog since it provides many suggestions and actions to resolve problems, which heavily impacts the business for our application customers when issues arise.

Datadog's best feature is real user monitoring.

I prefer Datadog's real user monitoring most because of its analytics capabilities. First, Datadog is recognized in the Gartner Digital Experience for real user monitoring. Second, the analytics capability is very powerful, enabling us to check the experience of customers first. We can also correlate with the back-end side of the performance for real user monitoring and application monitoring. Finally, the capability of metrics within real user monitoring provides many helpful insights for mobile developers to improve their mobile application performance.

Datadog could improve its pricing because it is very tricky, and most of our customers notice many hidden costs. Additionally, if possible, Datadog should offer deployment options not only for SaaS but also for on-premises solutions, which would benefit banking transactions.

Regarding pricing, it remains tricky with many hidden costs. For technological enhancement, there could be an on-premises option alongside the SaaS version. I also find setting up and configuring Datadog to be very complex.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that it is very tricky due to many hidden costs, so we need to check repeatedly for allotments and commitments regarding what we receive from the license.

My advice for others looking into using Datadog is to initially simplify the technical setup and configuration. Secondly, regarding pricing mechanisms, it would be wise to commit to clear allotments to avoid hidden costs for customers, as it significantly impacts pricing.

I believe Datadog is the largest single observability platform, with correlation as a differentiation factor, enterprise readiness as a measure, and cost management now being a key topic with a very clear roadmap and direction. I would rate this product nine out of ten.

My main use case for Datadog  is that we offer the application performance management service within PwC as a global team.

A specific example of how my team uses Datadog  for performance management is that my team does not directly use Datadog for performance management; however, we work with approximately 300 teams that use it daily for monitoring their apps. One of the most used cases is to observe when services are up and down and if services are not degraded.

We use most of every product within Datadog across the 300 customers that we have internally.

Datadog has positively impacted my organization because before Datadog, we had multiple APM  tools and monitoring tools, which fragmented the service. The reason was that some tools offered benefits to certain teams, while other tools offered different benefits to other teams. With Datadog, we managed to get everyone on board into a single place and a single tool, providing teams with one spot where they can check everything related to monitoring, and enabling management and leadership to have an overview of all tools working together.

I measured the impact of bringing everything into one place through observation, and I can confirm that efficiency in reporting improved dramatically and it became much easier to observe changes. Standardization was a tremendous win for us. Having a set of standard alerts and monitoring in place allowed us to speed up onboarding for every app. Once the resources are in Datadog, the system provides alerting out of the box. Additionally, cost has decreased dramatically.

Datadog's best features include very high demand for logs management for alerting on indexed logs and a shift towards Flex Logs for storage and long-term storage. Most recently, BitsAI and the LLM part within Datadog has been in focus for us.

Flex Logs has helped my teams because we are migrating from other services to have a unique place to store all the logs, the non-security logs, and the app logs. This has benefited those teams because they also benefit from other services within Datadog such as APM  or other monitoring solutions. By bringing the logs into Datadog, they now have a single place where they can correlate everything.

The LLM integration within Datadog has helped my teams because LLM usage is at the beginning stage right now, and people are very excited. We have all these AI and LLM-based tools, and having the option of monitoring them is a great benefit for us. However, we are in the exploratory phase of this process and have just begun.

BitsAI is very interesting; we have done some testing and we are going to promote it and use it in our production environment. This is a very exciting new tool for us.

Datadog can be improved because sometimes it seems it has not been developed for enterprises. We work with over 300 customers, with each customer having multiple instances or apps within Datadog. We are facing difficulties in controlling access, in privacy settings, and splitting usage and costs for these customers.

We want to be able to customize the cost part, and we would appreciate more granular access control.

I have been using Datadog for four or five years.

Datadog is stable.

We have never had an issue with Datadog's scalability.

Datadog's customer support is good; it could be improved in terms of communication, but it is adequate.

We previously used Grafana , AppDynamics, New Relic , Splunk, and a couple of other smaller, more dedicated tools.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is good; nothing out of the ordinary.

Before choosing Datadog, the biggest contender we evaluated was AppDynamics.

My advice for others looking into using Datadog is to test it out and see if it works for you. Try to become accustomed to the tagging part of things, and go through each product to understand what each product within Datadog is offering. I would rate this product an eight out of ten.

My main use case for Datadog  is logging security signals and monitoring account activity and suspicious behavior within our company.

For monitoring suspicious behavior, we look for alerts with things like unusual sign-in locations, unusual sign-in times, or registering new multi-factor devices in unusual circumstances or locations.

In addition to that, we also look for patterns and frequency of how often MFA is being prompted from individuals.

The best features Datadog  offers include the ability to generate reports very quickly and put in extensive filtering to get very specific information.

The report generation and filtering help me in my day-to-day work by assisting in generating reports for higher-ups and turning data into actionable items.

Since using Datadog, it has positively impacted our organization by giving us a one-stop shop for multiple applications and services that we can analyze in one spot.

Having a one-stop shop has made things easier for my team, and we have seen specific outcomes such as saving a lot of time.

Datadog could be improved if the menu system was a little clearer and less cluttered, making it easier to navigate.

Additionally, more documentation is always beneficial to have.

I have been using Datadog for about three years.

Datadog is very stable.

Its scalability is good, and it has kept up as our organization has grown or changed.

I have not had to reach out to customer support, so I cannot comment on that experience.

I did not previously use a different solution before Datadog.

While I don't have any specifics on money saved, I can say that it has definitely improved our efficiency overall.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Datadog shows that the pricing is very fair and setup has been very simple and easy to do.

Before choosing Datadog, I did not evaluate other options.

My advice to others looking into using Datadog is to read the documentation. I would rate this product a 9 out of 10.