We use the product for instrumentation, observability, monitoring, and alerting of our system.

We have multiple environments and a variety of pieces of infrastructure including servers, databases, load balancers, cache, etc. and we need to be able to monitor all of these pieces, while also retaining visibility into how the various pieces interact with each other.

Tracing data between components and user interactions that trigger these data flows is particularly important for understanding where problems arise and how to resolve them quickly.

It provides a lot of options for integrations and tooling to observe what is happening within the system, making diagnosis and triage easier/faster.

Each user can set up their own dashboards and share them with other users on the team. We can instrument monitors based on various patterns that we care about, then notify us when an event triggers an alert with platforms such as Slack or PagerDuty.

Our ability to rapidly become aware of problems focused on the symptoms being observed and entry points into the tool to rapidly identify where to investigate further is important for our team and our users.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include log search to help triage specific problems that we get notified about (whether by alerts we have configured or users that have contacted us), APM traces (to view how user interactions trace through the various layers of our infrastructure and services to be able to reproduce and identify the source of problems), general performance/system dashboards (to regularly monitor for stability or deviation), and alerting (to be automatically informed when a problem occurs). We also use the incident tools for tracking production incidents.

In some ways, the tool has a pretty steep learning curve. Discovering the various capabilities available, then learning how to utilize them for particular use cases can be challenging. Thankfully, there is a good amount of documentation with some good examples (more are always welcome), and support is very helpful.

While DataDog has started adding more correlation mapping between services and parts of our system, it is still tricky to understand what is the ultimate root cause when multiple views/components spike. Additionally, there are lots of views and insights that are available but hard to find or discover. Some of the best ways to discover is to just click around a lot and get familiar with views that are useful, but that takes time and isn't ideal when in the middle of fighting a fire.

I've used the solution for about four years.

It seems stable.

It seems to scale well. Performance for aggregating or searching is usually very fast.

Technical support is helpful and pretty responsive.

We did not use a different solution.

It's hard to say what ROI would be as I have not managed our system without it to compare to.

I don't manage licensing.

We did not evaluate other options.

It's a great tool with new features and improvements continuously being added. It is not simple to use or set up, however, if you have the right personnel, you can get a lot of value from what DataDog has to offer.

Internally our primary usage of Datadog pertains around APM/tracing, logging, RUM (real user monitoring), synthetic testing of service/application health and state, overall general monitoring + observability, and custom dashboards for aggregate observability. We also are more frequently leveraging the more recent service catalog feature.

We have several microservices, several databases, and a few web applications (both external and internal facing), and all of these within our systems are contained within several environments ranging from dev, sit, eat, and production.

Datadog has had a massive impact on our department. Before, we had loose logging dumped into a sea of GCP logs with haphazard custom solutions for traceability between logs and network calls. Datadog has helped standardize and normalize our processes around observability while providing fantastic tools for aggregating insight around what is monitored regularly, all wrapped in an easy-to-use UI.

Additionally, a range of types of users exist within our department, each with its own positive impact on Datadog. DevOps leverages it to easily manage infra, developers leverage it to easily monitor/debug services and applications, and business leverages it for statistics.

Personally I've found the RUM (real user monitoring) to be above and beyond what I've worked with before. Client-side monitoring has always been on the short end of the stick but the information collected and ease of instrumentation provided by Datadog is second to none.

Having a live dynamic service map is also one of my favourite features; it provides real-time insights into which services/applications are connected to which.

We are also investigating the new API catalog feature set, which I believe will provide a high-value impact for real-time documentation and information about all of our shared microservices that other dev teams can use.

In production, we intend to use trace IDs generated by RUM to attach to support tickets when a user experiences a traceable network error, and we want to display this trace ID to the user so if they were to contact us about a specific issue, they can provide us an exact ID displayed to them back to us. Currently, this is not possible out-of-the-box client-side without inventing our own solution for capturing these trace IDs, such as shimming the native fetch or returning the ID from the service response.

I've used the solution for approximately two years across our department and around a year or so of it being used practically and fully integrated into our systems.

Aside from one very brief bad update from the Datadog team around RUM where they broke the native 'fetch' for node in an update to RUM (which was resolved quickly) as it used to -- and may still -- modified the global 'fetch'; Datadog as a whole solution has been highly stable.

It's easy to implement and scale provided a there's a solid IaC solution in place to integrate across your system.

The Datadog support team is prompt and helpful when tickets have been submitted from our end. When their support team have been unsure, they've properly reached out internally to the relevant SME to help answer any questions we've had prior.

I've personally dabbled with some other open-source observability and monitoring solutions; however, prior to Datadog, our department did not have any solutions other than log dumps to GCP.

The initial setup was straightforward from my own experience, helping integrate within the application and service levels; however, our DevOps team handled most of the infra process with minimal complaints.

We handled the solution in-house.

I personally am not involved in the decision around costing; however, I am aware that when we first set up Datadog, we explicitly configured our services/applications to have a master switch to enable Datadog integration so that we can dynamically enable/disable targeted environments as need due to the costs being associated on a per service basis for APM/logging/etc.

I was not involved in the decision-making regarding the evaluation of other options.

I highly recommend Datadog, and I would explore it for my own individual projects in the future, provided the cost is within reason. Otherwise, I would highly recommend it for any medium-to-large-sized org.

We are using Datadog to improve our monitoring and observability so we can hopefully improve our customer experience and reliability.

I have been using Datadog to build better actionable alerts to help teams across the enterprise. Also by using Datadog we are hoping to have improved observability into our apps and we are also taking advantage of this process to improve our tagging strategy so teams can hopefully troubleshoot incidents faster and a much reduced mean time to resolve.

We have a lot of different resources we use like Kubernetes, App Gateway and Cosmos DB just to name a few.

As soon as we started implementing Datadog into our cloud environment people really like how it looked and how easy it was to navigate. We could see the most data in our Kubernetes environments than we ever could.

Some people liked how the logs were color coded so it was easy to see what kind of log you were looking at. The ease of making dashboards has also been greatly received as a benefit.

People have commented that there is so much information that it takes a time to digest and get used to what you are looking at and finding what you are looking for.

The selection of monitors is a big feature I have been working with. Previously with Azure Monitor we couldn't do a whole lot with their alerts. The log alerts can sometimes take a while to ingest. Also, we couldn't do any math with the metrics we received from logs to make better alerts from logs.

The metric alerts are ok but are still very limited. With Datadog, we can make a wide range of different monitors that we can tweak in real time because there is a graph of data as you are creating the alert which is very beneficial. The ease of making dashboards has saved a lot of people a lot of time. No KQL queries to put together the information you are looking for and the ability to pin any info you see into a dashboard is very convenient.

RUM is another feature we are looking forward to using this upcoming tax season, as we will have a front-row view into what frustrates customers or where things go wrong in their process of using our site.

The PagerDuty integration could be a little bit better. If there was a way to format the monitors to different incident management software that would be awesome. As of right now, it takes a lot of manipulating of PagerDuty to get the monitors from Datadog to populate all the fields we want in PagerDuty.

I love the fact you can query data without using something like KQL. However, it would also be helpful if there was a way to convert a complex KQL query into Datadog to be able to retrieve the same data - especially for very specific scenarios that some app teams may want to look for.

I've used the solution for about two years.

We previously used Azure Monitor, App Insights, and Log Analytics. We switched because it was a lot for developers and SREs to switch between three screens to try troubleshoot and when you add in the slow load times from Azure it can take a while to get things done.

I would advise taking a close look at logging costs, man-hours needed, and the amount of time it takes for people to get comfortable navigating Datadog because there is so much information that it can be overwhelming to narrow down what you need.

We did evaluate DynaTrace and looked into New Relic before settling on Datadog.

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.

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.

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.

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).

I've used the solution for 10 months.

Beware that the cost will fluctuate (and it often only gets more expensive very quickly).

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have been using the solution at my current company for almost four years, and have used it at my previous company as well.

A while ago, we used New Relic, and we switched due to Datadog being a better product.

We did the implementation in-house.

The value compared to pricing is reasonable, though it can be a bit of a sticker shock to some.

We did not evaluate other options.

We are using Datadog to improve our cloud monitoring and observability across our enterprise apps. We have integrated a lot of different resources into Datadog, like Kubernetes, App Gateways, App Service Environments, App Service Plans, and other Web App resources.

I will be using the monitoring and observability features of Datadog. Dashboards are used very heavily by teams and SREs. We really have seen that Datadog has already improved both our monitoring and our observability.

The ease and speed of which you can create a dashboard has been a huge improvement.

The different types of monitors we can create have been huge, too. We can do so many different things with monitors that we couldn't do before with our alerts.

Being able to click on a trace or log and drill down on it to see what happened has been great.

Some have found the learning curve a bit steep. That said,they are coming around slowly. There is just a lot of information to learn how to navigate.

The different types of monitors have been very valuable. We have been able to make our alerts (monitors) more actionable than we were able to previously.

Watchdog is a favorite feature among a lot of the devs. It catches things they didn't even know were an issue.

RUM is another feature a lot of us are looking forward to seeing how it can help us improve our customer experience during tax season.

We hope to enable the code review feature at some point to so we can see what code caused the issue.

I would like to see the integration between PagerDuty and Datadog improved. The tags in Datadog don't match those in PagerDuty, and we have to make it work. Also, I would like to see if the ability to replicate a KQL query in Datadog is made easier or better.

I would like to see the alert communications to email or phones made better so we could hopefully move off PagerDuty and just use Datadog for that.

There are also a lot of features that we haven't budgeted for yet and I would like for us to be able to use them in the future.

I've used the solution for about two years.

Our primary use case is 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. Managing a hybrid multi-cloud solution across hundreds of applications is always a challenge.

Datadog agents on each web host, and native integrations with GitHub, AWS, and Azure gets all of our instrumentation and error data in one place for easy analysis and monitoring.

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.

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 breadth of coverage for any app type or situation is really incredible. It feels like there's nothing we can't monitor.

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.

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.

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.

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. I spent longer than I should have figuring out how to correlate logs to traces, mostly related to environmental variables.

I've used the solution for about three years.

We have been impressed with the uptime and clean and light resource usage of the agents.

The solution has been very scalable and customizable.

Sales service is always helpful in tuning our committed costs and alerting us when we start spending outside the on-demand budget.

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.

Generally simple, but .NET Profiling of IIS and aligning logs to traces and profiles was a challenge.

We implemented the solution in-house.

I'd count our ROI as significant time saved by the development team assessing bugs and performance issues.

Set up live trials to asses cost scaling. Small decisions around how monitors are used can have big impacts on cost scaling.

NewRelic was considered. LogicMonitor was chosen over Datadog for our network and campus server management use cases.

Excited to dig further into the new offerings around LLM and continue to grow our footprint in Datadog.