Datadog: Is It the Best APM Tool for IT Professionals?

Application performance monitoring (APM) has become essential for businesses looking to optimize their apps, streamline workflows, and ensure exceptional user experiences. Datadog is a popular choice in this space, offering tools that monitor not just app performance but also infrastructure, security, and other factors that can impact app functionality.

Datadog has become one of the most popular APM platforms, largely because it can also monitor infrastructure, security, and other factors that influence app performance.

Is it the right monitoring and analytics tool for your team? Let’s take a closer look so we can help you make an informed decision.

What is Datadog?

Datadog is a performance monitoring platform for applications, infrastructure, and security. It has a graphics-based dashboard and flexible features that work in diverse environments. Most IT professionals using Datadog work with enterprise-level applications, although some plans make it appropriate for monitoring applications with fewer users.

What can Datadog do?

Datadog can do pretty much anything you need to optimize an application’s performance and security. It has tools focused on front-end and back-end management, so you can improve user experience and monitor your databases.

Unfortunately, Datadog doesn’t come as a full suite of app management products. Instead, you have to choose from a large menu of plans that include:

• Database monitoring
• Log management
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
  
• Mobile app testing and monitoring
• Incident monitoring
• Cloud security management
• Network monitoring
• CI visibility
• Cloud cost management
• Application vulnerability management
• Application security management
• Audit trails
• Serverless monitoring
• Continuous testing
• Universal service monitoring
• Workflow automation

When we use Datadog, we typically rely on a combination of these and other plans. Even at the most fundamental level, we find that it makes sense to use mobile app testing and monitoring, real user monitoring, and incident monitoring together. That way, we can see how an application performs, pinpoint potential problems, and find ways to optimize code to prevent future incidents.

You can mix and match plans as you see fit, but each one adds a cost to your overall Datadog plan.

What we like about Datadog

We often recommend Datadog for the following reasons.

User-friendly dashboard

Datadog provides a unified dashboard that lets you monitor your system’s performance. You don’t need a unique dashboard for each application you monitor, although it’s rarely a bad idea to take a granular look at app performance.

It takes some time and expertise to set up Datadog’s dashboard. Once you customize it, though, you get a user-friendly perspective that practically any IT professional can use. The graphics-based reporting also makes it easy to spot sudden changes in performance. If you notice a sudden spike or dip, you can investigate further to determine what happened.

AI and machine learning features

Datadog Watchdog uses AI and ML to continuously analyze data for aberrations. When something out of the ordinary happens, Watchdog will try to automatically find the root cause. It doesn’t always know precisely what issue to address, but it will help your team narrow their options so they can remediate problems as quickly as possible.

Connects with most IT assets

Datadog can connect with practically any service or app to improve performance. It can collect data from apps running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, and other popular options.

Datadog also works well with most programming languages, including Python, Java, and Go.

Strong customer service and coaching

APMs only work well when you know how to use them properly. Datadog helps ensure your success through strong customer service and coaching. We didn’t know how to access all of Datadog’s features the first time we used it. Few people would. After some instruction from a Datadog representative, we could quickly customize dashboards, connect new applications, and take control of costs.

There’s a bit of a learning curve, but Datadog helps you adjust as quickly as possible.

Potential improvements for Datadog

No platform does everything perfectly. Ideally, we would like to see:

• Better communication from Datadog when it experiences an outage. (It didn’t handle this very well during a day-long outage in March 2023.)
• More transparent pricing that doesn’t require help from a sales rep.
• A more intuitive interface that doesn't require training.

Although Datadog works with most operating systems, you might get different logging formats depending on whether you use Windows, Mac, or a Unix-like OS.

How much does Datadog cost?

Datadog has complex pricing that can make it difficult to determine precisely how much you will pay. Each plan adds to Datadog’s cost.

It gets even more complicated, though, when you consider that prices can change depending on factors like the number of hosts you have, how many tests you run, and even which cloud service provider you use. For example, serverless monitoring costs $5 per active function, per month when you use AWS, but the price starts at $3 per month when you use Azure or Google.

You might not mind Datadog’s price when you want robust monitoring, testing, and observability that addresses today’s biggest cloud security challenges. We recommend talking to a Datadog representative before signing up, though. They can help you get a much better idea of how much the services you need will cost.

Datadog alternatives

Datadog is an excellent tool for monitoring applications, infrastructure, and logs in real time to ensure performance and reliability. Still, it isn’t the perfect fit for everyone. It’s worth exploring alternatives before committing to Datadog. Some of our favorites include:

• AppDynamics – We like AppDynamics for users who want to put cloud-native application observability at the center of their user experience tracking.
• Dynatrace– It’s especially nice that Dynatrace offers device discovery, which you won’t get from Datadog.
• Loupe – One of the most robust tools we’ve found for tracing events and correcting errors quickly.
• New Relic – We really like that you can dig into metrics like transactions and clickstreams to improve user experiences.

Final Thoughts – Is Datadog the Right APM Tool for You?

Choosing the right application performance monitoring tool is crucial to your business’s success. Datadog offers robust features for real-time monitoring and integrates with a broad range of services. However, its complex pricing structure and learning curve may not make it ideal for everyone. If you need help evaluating Datadog or other APM solutions, feel free to connect with us.

Find the right monitoring tool for your business

Is Datadog the right monitoring tool for your business? Let's discuss Datadog and other APM platforms that might match your needs.