Good for log ingestion and analyzing logs with easy searchability of data
What is our primary use case?
We use Datadog as our main log ingestion source, and Datadog is one of the first places we go to for analyzing logs.
This is especially true for cases of debugging, monitoring, and alerting on errors and incidents, as we use traffic logs from K8s, Amazon Web Services, and many other services at our company to Datadog. In addition, many products and teams at our company have dashboards for monitoring statistics (sometimes based on these logs directly, other times we set queries for these metrics) to alert us if there are any errors or health issues.
How has it helped my organization?
Overall, at my company, Datadog has made it easy to search for and look up logs at an impressively quick search rate over a large amount of logs.
It seamlessly allows you to set up monitoring and alerting directly from log queries which is convenient and helps for a good user experience, and while there is a bit of a learning curve, given enough time a majority of my company now uses Datadog as the first place to check when there are errors or bugs.
However, the cost aspect of Datadog is tricky to gauge because it's related to usage, and thus, it is hard to tell the relative value of Datadog year to year.
What is most valuable?
The feature I've found most valuable is the log search feature. It's set up with our ingestion to be a quick one-stop shop, is reliable and quick, and seamlessly integrates into building custom monitors and alerts based on log volume and timeframes.
As a result, it's easy to leverage this to triage bugs and errors, since we can pinpoint the logs around the time that they occur and get metadata/context around the issue. This is the main feature that I use the most in my workflow with Datadog to help debug and triage issues.
What needs improvement?
More helpful log search keywords/tips would be helpful in improving Datadog's log dashboard. I recently struggled a lot to parse text from raw line logs that didn't seem to match directly with facets. There should be smart searching capabilities. However, it's not intuitive to learn how to leverage them, and instead had to resort to a Python script to do some simple regex parsing (I was trying to parse "file:folder/*/*" from the logs and yet didn't seem to be able to do this in Datadog, maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the logs but didn't seem to easily find resources on how to do this either).
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for 10 months.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Beware that the cost will fluctuate (and it often only gets more expensive very quickly).
Good visibility into application performance, understanding of end-user behavior, and a single pane of glass view
What is our primary use case?
The primary use case for this solution is to enhance our monitoring visibility, determine the root cause of incidents, understand end-user behaviour from their point of view (RUM), and understand application performance.
Our technical environment consists of a local dev env where Datadog is not enabled, we have deployed environments that range from UAT testing with our product org to ephemeral stacks that our developers use to test there code not on there computer. We also have a mobile app where testing is also performed.
How has it helped my organization?
Datadog has greatly improved our organization in many ways. Some of those ways include greater visibility into application performance, understanding of end-user behavior, and a single pane of glass view into our entire infrastructure.
Regarding visibility, our organization previously used New Relic, and when incidents or regressions happened, New Relic's query language was very hard to use. End-user behavior in RUM has improved our ability to know what to focus on. Lastly, the single pane of glass view with maneuvering between products has helped us truly understand root causes after incidents.
What is most valuable?
APM has been a top feature for us. I can speak for all developers here: they use it more often than other products. Due to a standard in tracing (even though it is customizable), engineers find it easier to walk a trace than to understand what went wrong when looking at logging.
Another feature that I find valuable, though it isn't the first one that comes to mind, is Watchdog. I have found that has been a good source of understanding anomalies and where maybe we (as an organization) need more monitoring coverage.
What needs improvement?
I am not 100% sure how this is done or if it can be though I've had a lot of education I've had to do to ramp developers up on the platform. This feels like the nature of just the sheer growth and number of products Datadog now offers.
When I first started using the Datadog platform, I thought that was a big pro of the company that the ramp-up time was much quicker, not having to learn a query language. I still believe that to be true when comparing the product to someone like New Relic though with the wide range of products Datadog now offers it can be a bit intimidating to developers to know where to go to find what they want.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using the solution at my current company for almost four years, and have used it at my previous company as well.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
A while ago, we used New Relic, and we switched due to Datadog being a better product.
What about the implementation team?
We did the implementation in-house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The value compared to pricing is reasonable, though it can be a bit of a sticker shock to some.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other options.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Helpful support, with centralized pipeline tracking and error logging
What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case is custom and vendor-supplied web application log aggregation, performance tracing and alerting.
How has it helped my organization?
Through the use of Datadog across all of our apps, we were able to consolidate a number of alerting and error-tracking apps, and Datadog ties them all together in cohesive dashboards.
What is most valuable?
The centralized pipeline tracking and error logging provide a comprehensive view of our development and deployment processes, making it much easier to identify and resolve issues quickly.
Synthetic testing is great, allowing us to catch potential problems before they impact real users. Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most. And the ability to create custom dashboards has been incredibly useful, allowing us to visualize key metrics and KPIs in a way that makes sense for different teams and stakeholders.
What needs improvement?
While the documentation is very good, there are areas that need a lot of focus to pick up on the key details. In some cases the screenshots don't match the text when updates are made.
I spent longer than I should trying to figure out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for about three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have been impressed with the uptime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's scalable and customizable.
How are customer service and support?
Support is helpful. They help us tune our committed costs and alert us when we start spending out of the on-demand budget.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used a mix of SolarWinds, UptimeRobot, and GitHub actions. We switched to find one platform that could give deep app visibility.
How was the initial setup?
Setup is generally simple. .NET Profiling of IIS and aligning logs to traces and profiles was a challenge.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented the solution in-house.
What was our ROI?
There has been significant time saved by the development team in terms of assessing bugs and performance issues.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'd advise others to set up live trials to asses cost scaling. Small decisions around how monitors are used can have big impacts on cost scaling.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
NewRelic was considered. LogicMonitor was chosen over Datadog for our network and campus server management use cases.
What other advice do I have?
We are excited to dig further into the new offerings around LLM and continue to grow our footprint in Datadog.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Consistent, centralized service for varied cloud-based applications
What is our primary use case?
The current use case for Datadog in our environment is observability. We use Datadog as the primary log ingestion and analysis point, along with consolidation of application/infrastructure metrics across cloud environments and realtime alerting to issues that arise in production.
Datadog integrates within all aspects of our infrastructure and applications to provide valuable insights into Containers, Serverless functions, Deep Logging Analysis, Virtualized Hardware and Cost Optimizations.
How has it helped my organization?
Datadog improved our observability layer by creating a consistent, centralized service for all of our varied cloud-based applications. All of our production and non-production environment applications and infrastructure send metrics directly to Datadog for analysis and determination of any issues that would need to be looked at by the Infrastructure, Platform and Development teams for quick remediation. Using Datadog as this centralized Observability platform has enabled us to become leaner without sacrificing project timelines when issues arise and require triage for efficient resolution.
What is most valuable?
All of Datadog's features have become valuable tools in our cloud environments.
Our primary alerts, based on metrics and synthetic transactions, are the most used and relied upon for decreased MTTA/MTTR across all of our platforms. This is followed by deep log analysis that enables us to quickly and easily get to a preliminary root cause that someone on the infrastructure, platform or development teams can take and focus their attention on the precise target that Datadog revealed as the issue to be remediated.
What needs improvement?
The two areas I could see needing improvement or a feature to add value are building a more robust SIM that would include container scanning to rival other such products on the market so we do not need to extend functionality to another third-party provider. The other expands the alerting functions by creating a new feature to add direct SMS notifications, on-call rotation scheduling, etc., that could replace the need to have this as an external third party solution integration.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been a Datadog user for almost ten years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Datadog is very stable, and we've only come across a few items that needed to be addressed quickly when there were issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is very favorable, aside from cost/budget, which limits the scalability of this platform.
How are customer service and support?
Both customer service and support need a little work, as we have had a number of requests/issues that were not addressed as we needed them to be.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Being an Observability SME, I have used many native and third party solutions, including Dynatrace, New Relic, CloudWatch and Zabbix. As previously mentioned, Datadog provides a superior platform for centralizing and consolidating our Observability layer. Switching to Datadog was a no-brainer when most other solutions either didn't provide the maturity of functions, or have them available, at all.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was very straightforward, and the integrations were easily configured.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented Datadog in-house.
What was our ROI?
For the most part, Datadog's ROI is quite impressive when you consider all of the features and functions that are centralized on the platform. It doesn't require us to purchase additional third-party solutions to fill in the gaps.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The setup was dead simple once the cloud integrations and agent components were identified and executed. Licensing falls into our normal third-party processes, so it was a familiar feeling when we started with Datadog. Cost is the only outlier when it comes to a perfect solution. Datadog is expensive, and each add-on drives that cost further into the realm of requiring justifications to finance expanding the core suite of features we would like to enable.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Yes, we evaluated several competing platforms that included Dynatrace, New Relic and Zabbix.
What other advice do I have?
They should provide more inclusive pricing, or an "all you can eat" tier that would include all relevant features, as opposed to individual cost increases to let Datadog to become more valuable and replace even more third-party solutions that have a lower cost of entry.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
Enhances efficiency with robust alerting and visualization tools
What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case for Datadog is to monitor and manage our fully cloud-native infrastructure. We utilize DataDog to gain real-time visibility into our cloud environments, ensuring that all our services are running smoothly and efficiently.
The platform’s extensive integration capabilities allow us to seamlessly track performance metrics across various cloud services, containers, and microservices.
With Datadog’s robust alerting and visualization tools, we can proactively identify and resolve issues, minimizing downtime and optimizing our system’s performance. This has been crucial in maintaining the reliability and scalability of our cloud-native applications.
How has it helped my organization?
Datadog has significantly enhanced our organization’s operational efficiency and reliability. By providing real-time visibility into our cloud-native infrastructure, Datadog enables us to monitor performance metrics, detect anomalies, and resolve issues swiftly.
The platform’s robust alerting system ensures that potential problems are addressed before they impact our services, reducing downtime and improving overall system stability. Additionally, Datadog’s comprehensive dashboards and reporting tools have streamlined our troubleshooting processes and facilitated better decision-making.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of Datadog for our organization has been its real-time monitoring capabilities. This feature provides us with instant visibility into our cloud-native infrastructure, allowing us to track performance metrics and detect anomalies as they occur. The ability to monitor our systems in real-time means we can quickly identify and address issues before they escalate, minimizing downtime and ensuring the reliability of our services.
Additionally, the real-time data helps us make informed decisions and optimize our operations, ultimately enhancing our overall efficiency and performance.
What needs improvement?
While Datadog has been instrumental in enhancing our operational efficiency, there are areas where it could be improved.
One area is the user interface, which could be more intuitive and user-friendly, especially for new users.
Additionally, the pricing model can be quite complex and might benefit from more flexible options tailored to different organizational needs.
For future releases, it would be beneficial to include more advanced machine learning capabilities for predictive analytics, helping us anticipate issues before they occur.
More third-party tools would also be valuable additions.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for six years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
DataDog has proven to be a highly stable solution for our monitoring needs. Throughout our usage, we have experienced minimal downtime and consistent performance, even during peak traffic periods. The platform’s reliability ensures that we can continuously monitor our cloud-native infrastructure without interruptions, which is crucial for maintaining the health and performance of our services.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
DataDog’s scalability has been impressive and instrumental in supporting our growing cloud-native infrastructure. The platform effortlessly handles increased workloads and scales alongside our expanding services without compromising performance. Its ability to integrate with a wide range of cloud services and technologies ensures that as we grow, DataDog continues to provide comprehensive monitoring and insights.
How are customer service and support?
Our experience with Datadog’s customer service and support has been exceptional. The support team is highly responsive and knowledgeable, providing timely assistance whenever we’ve encountered issues or had questions.
Their proactive approach to offering solutions and guidance has been invaluable in helping us maximize the platform’s capabilities.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The setup is straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
We handled the setup in-house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing model can be quite complex and might benefit from more flexible options tailored to different organizational needs.
What other advice do I have?
One area is the user interface, which could be more intuitive and user-friendly, especially for new users.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Useful log aggregation and management with helpful metrics aggregation
What is our primary use case?
We use Datadog for log aggregation and management, metrics aggregation, application performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring (serverless (Lambda functions), containers (EKS), standalone hosts (EC2)), database monitoring (RDS) and alerting based on metric thresholds and anomalies, log events, APM anomalies, forecasted threshold breaches, host behaviors and synthetics tests.
Datadog serves a whole host of purposes for us, with an all-in-one UI and integrations between them built in and handled without any effort required from us.
We use Datadog for nearly all of our monitoring and information analysis from the infrastructure level up through the application stack.
How has it helped my organization?
Datadog provides us value in three major ways:
First, Datadog provides best-in-class functionality in many, if not all, of the products to which we subscribe (infrastructure, APM, log management, serverless, synthetics, real user monitoring, DB monitoring). In my experience with other tools that provide similar functionality, Datadog provides the largest feature set with the most flexibility and the best performance.
Second, Datadog allows us to access all of those services in one place. Having to learn and manage only one tool for all of those purposes is a major benefit.
Third, Datadog provides significant connectivity between those services so that we can view, summarize, organize, translate and correlate our data with maximum effect. Not needing to manually integrate them to draw lines between those pieces of information is a huge time savings for us.
What is most valuable?
I use log management and monitors most often.
Log management is a great way for me to identify changes in behavior across services and environments as we make changes or as user behavior evolves. I can filter out excess or not useful logs, in part or in full, I can look for trends and I can group by multiple facets.
Monitors allow me to rest easy knowing that I'll be alerted to unexpected changes in behavior throughout our environments so that I can be proactive without having to dedicate active cycles to watching all facets of our environments.
What needs improvement?
In my four years using the product, the only feature request I, or anyone on my team, has had was the ability to view query parameters in query samples.
Otherwise, improvements are already released faster than we can give them sufficient time and attention, so I'm very happy with the product and don't have any specific requests at this time.
The cost does add up quickly, so it can be some effort to justify the necessary outlay to those paying the bills. That said, Datadog provides sufficient benefits to warrant our continued use.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In four years of daily use I haven't noticed any periods of downtime.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's amazing to me how performant Datadog is given how much data we pass to it.
How are customer service and support?
We've opened probably six or eight support tickets in four years of use. In some cases, the problem or question was complex and took some time to resolve. That said, customer support was always able to debug the issue and find a solution for us, so my experience has been very positive.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've used New Relic, Honeycomb, Grafana, Splunk, Prometheus, Graylog and others.
How was the initial setup?
Given the breadth of configuration options, the initial setup was fairly involved for us. We also use several services and deploy the agent in various ways because we're using traditional servers, serverless, and K8s.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented the solution in-house.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution can be pricey if you're using many services and/or shipping lots of data, but in my opinion, the value is greater than the cost, so I would suggest doing an evaluation before making a decision.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Great for web application log aggregation, performance tracing, and alerting
What is our primary use case?
Our primary use case is for custom and vendor-supplied web application log aggregation, performance tracing, and alerting.
We run a mix of AWS EC2, Azure serverless, and colocated VMWare servers to support higher education web applications. We're managing a hybrid multi-cloud solution across hundreds of applications is always a challenge.
Datadog agents are on each web host, and we have native integrations with GitHub, AWS, and Azure to get all of our instrumentation and error data in one place for easy analysis and monitoring.
How has it helped my organization?
Through use of Datadog across all of our apps, we were able to consolidate a number of alerting and error-tracking apps. Datadog ties them all together in cohesive dashboards. Whether the app is vendor supplied or we built it ourselves, the depth of tracing, profiling, and hooking into logs is all obtainable and tunable. Both legacy .NET Framework and Windows Event Viewer and cutting edge .NET Core with streaming logs all work. The breath of coverage for any app type or situation is really incredible. It feels like there's nothing we can't monitor.
What is most valuable?
When it comes to Datadog, several features have proven particularly valuable.
The centralized pipeline tracking and error logging provide a comprehensive view of our development and deployment processes, making it much easier to identify and resolve issues quickly.
Synthetic testing has been a game-changer, allowing us to catch potential problems before they impact real users.
Real user monitoring gives us invaluable insights into actual user experiences, helping us prioritize improvements where they matter most. And the ability to create custom dashboards has been incredibly useful, allowing us to visualize key metrics and KPIs in a way that makes sense for different teams and stakeholders.
Together, these features form a powerful toolkit that helps us maintain high performance and reliability across our applications and infrastructure, ultimately leading to better user satisfaction and more efficient operations.
What needs improvement?
I'd like to see an expansion of the Android and IOS apps to have a simplified CI/CD pipeline history view.
I like the idea of monitoring on the go, yet it seems the options are still a bit limited out of the box.
While the documentation is very good considering all the frameworks and technology Datadog covers, there are areas - specifically .NET Profiling and Tracing of IIS hosted apps - that need a lot of focus to pick up on the key details needed.
In some cases the screenshots don't match the text as updates are made.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for about three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We have been impressed with the uptime. It offers clean and light resource usage of the agents.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The solution scales well and is customizable.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support is always helpful to help us tune our committed costs and alerting us when we start spending out of the on demand budget.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used a mix of a custom error email system, SolarWinds, UptimeRobot, and GitHub actions. We switched to find one platform that could give deep app visibility regardless of whether it is Linux or Windows or Container, cloud or on-prem hosted.
How was the initial setup?
The implementation is generally simple. .NET Profiling of IIS and aligning logs to traces and profiles was a challenge.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented the setup in-house.
What was our ROI?
We've witnessed significant time saved by the development team assessing bugs and performance issues.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Set up live trials to asses cost scaling. Small decisions around how monitors are used can have big impacts on cost scaling.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
NewRelic was considered. LogicMonitor was chosen over Datadog for our network and campus server management use cases.
What other advice do I have?
We're excited to dig further into the new offerings around LLM and continue to grow our footprint in Datadog.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Microsoft Azure
Proactive, provides user trends, and works harmoniously
What is our primary use case?
From day one, we have seamlessly integrated our new product into Datadog, a comprehensive monitoring and analytics platform. By doing so, we are continuously collecting essential data such as host information, system logs, and key performance metrics. This enables us to gain deep insights into product adoption, monitor usage patterns, and ensure optimal performance. Additionally, we use Datadog to capture and analyze errors in real-time, allowing us to troubleshoot, replay, and resolve production issues efficiently.
How has it helped my organization?
It has proven invaluable in helping us identify early issues within the product as soon as they occur, allowing us to take immediate action before they escalate into more significant problems. This proactive approach ensures that potential challenges are addressed in real-time, minimizing any impact on users. Furthermore, the system allows us to measure product adoption and usage trends effectively, providing insights into how customers are interacting with the product and identifying areas for improvement or enhancement.
What is most valuable?
There isn't any single aspect that stands out in particular; rather, everything is interconnected and works together harmoniously. Each component complements the other, creating a cohesive system where data, logs, and metrics are seamlessly integrated. This interconnectedness ensures that no part operates in isolation, allowing for a more holistic view of the product's performance and health. The way everything binds together strengthens our ability to monitor, analyze, and improve the product efficiently.
What needs improvement?
At the moment, nothing specific comes to mind. Everything seems to be functioning well, and there are no immediate concerns or issues that I can think of.
The system is operating as expected, and any challenges we've faced so far have been successfully addressed. If anything does come up in the future, we will continue to monitor and assess it accordingly, but right now, there’s nothing that stands out requiring attention or improvement.
Datadog is too pricey when compared to its competitors, and this is something that its always on my mind during the decision-making process.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for nearly two years now.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Increases efficiency, helps with customer satisfaction, and enhances collaboration
What is our primary use case?
The primary use case of Datadog within our organization encompasses providing a comprehensive and sophisticated solution that caters to the diverse needs of our internal customers. We have strategically implemented Datadog to serve as a centralized platform for monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing various aspects of our operations. With a robust suite of functionalities, Datadog empowers us to meet the dynamic requirements of over 40 internal customers efficiently.
Through Datadog, we offer a wide array of services to our internal stakeholders, allowing them to access and leverage its capabilities to enhance performance, troubleshoot issues, and make data-driven decisions. The tool's versatility enables different teams within our organization to monitor and track distinct metrics, such as application performance, infrastructure health, and logs, tailored to their specific requirements.
Moreover, Datadog serves as a pivotal component in our organizational ecosystem by streamlining processes, enhancing collaboration, and fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making. By harnessing the power of Datadog, our internal customers can proactively address issues, optimize resources, and ultimately improve operational efficiency across the board.
In essence, the primary use case of Datadog in our organization revolves around empowering our internal customers with a comprehensive and feature-rich solution that enables them to monitor, analyze, and optimize various aspects of our operations seamlessly and effectively. This strategic implementation of Datadog plays a vital role in enhancing our overall performance, fostering transparency, and driving continuous improvement within our organization.
How has it helped my organization?
Datadog has significantly contributed to enhancing the overall effectiveness and efficiency of our organization through various key improvements. One of the standout benefits has been the accelerated resolution of issues. By leveraging Datadog's monitoring and alerting capabilities, we have been able to swiftly detect, diagnose, and address issues before they escalate, resulting in minimized downtime and enhanced operational continuity.
Moreover, the implementation of Datadog has had a tangible positive impact on customer satisfaction. With improved visibility into our systems and applications, coupled with proactive monitoring and performance optimization, we have been able to deliver a more reliable and seamless experience to our customers. This has translated into higher customer satisfaction scores and strengthened relationships with our stakeholders.
Another notable improvement brought about by Datadog is the streamlining of our toolset. By identifying and removing multiple unused or redundant features and tools, Datadog has helped optimize our workflows and resources. This decluttering of unnecessary functionalities has not only increased operational efficiency yet also streamlined our processes, allowing us to focus on the tools and features that truly add value to our operations.
In summary, Datadog's impact on our organization has been profound, enhancing our ability to resolve issues rapidly, improving customer satisfaction levels, and streamlining our toolset for increased efficiency and focus. These improvements have led to a more robust and resilient operational environment, enabling us to better meet the needs of our internal and external stakeholders.
What is most valuable?
Within our organization, we have found the Agents feature in Datadog to be exceptionally valuable due to its rich set of functionalities and capabilities. The Agents play a crucial role in our monitoring and data collection processes, providing a comprehensive and reliable means to gather crucial performance metrics and insights across our systems and applications.
One of the key reasons why the agents feature stands out as particularly valuable is its versatility. The Agents offer a wide range of monitoring and data collection options, allowing us to capture diverse metrics and performance data with precision. This flexibility enables us to tailor our monitoring strategy to meet the specific needs of different teams and use cases within our organization.
Moreover, the agents feature in Datadog enhances the overall observability of our infrastructure and applications. By deploying Agents strategically across our environment, we can gather real-time metrics, logs, and traces, enabling us to monitor the health, performance, and behavior of our systems comprehensively. This deep level of observability empowers us to proactively identify issues, optimize performance, and make informed decisions based on accurate and timely data.
Furthermore, the agents feature in Datadog plays a pivotal role in driving actionable insights and facilitating efficient troubleshooting. With the detailed data collected by the Agents, we can perform in-depth analysis, detect anomalies, and troubleshoot issues quickly and effectively. This proactive approach to monitoring and analysis ultimately enhances our operational efficiency and resilience.
In essence, the agents feature in Datadog stands out as a valuable asset within our organization due to its robust functionality, versatility, and role in providing comprehensive monitoring and observability capabilities. By leveraging the power of the Agents feature, we can effectively monitor, analyze, and optimize our systems and applications to ensure seamless operations and performance excellence.
What needs improvement?
In assessing areas for potential improvement, one key aspect where Datadog could enhance its service is in the realm of billing CSV reports. Presently, the billing CSV reports provide insights into billing-related information yet are somewhat limited in functionality, typically offering reports with only three columns. Expanding the capabilities of the billing CSV reports to include more detailed and customizable information would greatly benefit users by allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of their usage, costs, and billing trends within Datadog.
Additionally, in considering features for inclusion in the next release of Datadog, the development of more robust and customizable billing CSV reports could be a significant enhancement. By allowing users to tailor their billing reports to specific metrics, timeframes, and parameters of interest, Datadog could provide greater transparency and control over billing data, enabling users to make informed decisions regarding resource allocation, cost optimization, and budget planning.
Moreover, the inclusion of features such as cost forecasting, budget tracking, and customizable alerts related to billing thresholds could further empower users to manage their expenses effectively and proactively monitor and control costs within Datadog. These additions would not only enhance user experience and satisfaction, however, also contribute to a more holistic and actionable approach to financial management within the Datadog platform.
By refining the functionality of billing CSV reports and incorporating advanced features for cost analysis, forecasting, and monitoring, Datadog can elevate its service offering and provide users with enhanced tools for optimizing their usage, expenses, and financial oversight within the platform.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for over three years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Datadog is easy to scale. However, it's scaled for price, so be sure to measure what you need and not push all logs to the solution, or your price will skyrocket quickly.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We use multiple APM tools to have both price and value correlations relevant to the teams using them.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Request a test account during the POC phase to determine if the tool is the right fit; all providers do that for free.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did POC with over five products. I can't name them due to the related NDA.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud
Easy, more reliable, and transparent monitoring
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution to monitor and investigate issues with production services at work. We're periodically reviewing the service catalog view for the various applications and I use it to identify any anomalies with service metrics, any changes in user behavior evident via API calls, and/or spikes in errors.
We use monitors to trigger alerts for on-call engineers to act upon. The monitors have set thresholds for request latency, error rates, and throughput.
We also use automated rules to block bad actors based on request volume or patterns.
How has it helped my organization?
Datadog has made setting up monitors easier, more reliable, and more transparent. This has helped standardize our on-call process and set all of our on-call engineers up for success.
It has also standardized the way we evaluate issues with our applications by encouraging all teams to use the service catalog.
It makes it easier for our platforms and QA teams to get other engineering teams up to speed with managing their own applications' performance.
Overall, Datadog has been very helpful for us.
What is most valuable?
The service catalog view is very helpful for periodic reviews of our application. It has also standardized the way we evaluate issues with our applications. Having one page with an easy-to-scan view of app metrics, error patterns, package vulnerabilities, etc., is very helpful and reduces friction for our full-stack engineers.
Monitors have also been very valuable when setting up our on-call processes. It makes it easy to set up and adjust alerting to keep our teams aware of anything going wrong.
What needs improvement?
Datadog is great overall. One thing to improve would be making it easier to see common patterns across traces. I sometimes end up in a trace but have a hard time finding other common features about the error/requests that are similar to that trace. This could be easier to get to; however, in that case, it's actually an education issue.
Another thing that could be improved is the service list page sometimes refreshes slowly, and I accidentally click the wrong environment since the sort changes late.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for about a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable. I have not seen any issues with Datadog.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
How are customer service and support?
I've had no specific experience with technical support.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used Honeycomb before. We switched since Datadog offered more tooling.
How was the initial setup?
Each application has been easy to instrument.
What about the implementation team?
We implemented the solution in-house.
What was our ROI?
Engineers save an unquantifiable amount of time by having one standard view for all applications and monitors.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I am not exposed to this aspect of Datadog.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other options.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Public Cloud