Answering this question might be too complicated, as it is impossible to answer it with only a yes or no. You should ask yourself: Will your company take advantage of every benefit Datadog offers? Do you have a lot of information to manage? How much do their services cost? How good are their prices compared to other tools? These are some of the things you must consider when analyzing monitoring systems.
We will address some of these points to help you decide if Datadog is the best investment option, if it can add value to your business, and what benefits it can offer you.
Datadog allows you to monitor your systems through many tools, but not all of them are a must for everyone. To make it easier, Datadog divided and grouped its tools by functionalities so that you can only pay for the ones you use. Next, you will find the functions we consider relevant for any organization.
One of the most used functions is infrastructure monitoring if your company needs to keep track of the health of your hosts. It will allow you to have many hosts (50 +), check their status through metrics sent to Datadog, and generate out-of-box dashboards saving the data for 15 months or more if you need to customize it.
We understand that logs help store your company’s information and know what things are being processed, their status, and their time, besides other things. Every host constantly generates logs, quickly becoming a massive volume of information to maintain and digest. Datadog lets you pay for each GB ingested, allowing you more exact cost management of your systems and preventing you from paying for unused capacity.
You can find different options for managing your cloud systems Thankfully, Datadog has many integrations for them. Each integration allows real-time threat detection and identifies misconfigurations using rules between the choices that Datadog has for you (or writing your own). Datadog provides these cloud functions using logs, and you pay for each GB analyzed.
There are situations where you want to see how a user interacts with your web or application system. Datadog has the RUM option, a functionality billed based on user sessions, starting at 1000 sessions per month. Each session analyzes what users do and checks their actions, such as detecting slow tasks or replicating a user error.
In modern solutions, it's very common to have distributed processes using systems such as queues, databases, load-balancers, and streams. Tracing events in these processing pipelines it's complex due to its distributed nature. Datadog offers Application Performance Monitoring, or APM, to allow you to measure and monitor distributed events. With APM, you will be able to trace a single event and even correlate it to the logs it has produced in the many different hosts participating in the distributed process. This is a useful tool to narrow down the troubleshooting cases. This feature costs based on the number of hosts and volume of the ingested traces, regardless of the number of applications or services that each host has.
So, which feature do you need to choose? You don’t have to decide right now. As mentioned above, Datadog allows you to trial their entire system for free for 14 days. This free trial, as such, is not a subscription for its duration; that is why some functions will not be available—for example, the 15 monthly data retention. But the trial will give you an idea of whether the tools will cover your needs. Also, it is an excellent option for letting new users get familiar with the UI and its benefits.
But what about pricing?
Before you analyze the table below, you must know that this table does not thoroughly compare every available capacity and functionality, as each tool differs in its offerings and pricing details. The representation below is generic and grouped by the most used categories. The best way to have accurate billing information is to contact a representative of every tool and explain your specific company needs in detail.
*Prices as provided on their websites as of June 22, 2022, are subject to change.
We highly recommend understanding your company’s needs, such as the volume of data you handle, the possible integration with different systems, or the ones you will review. Knowing those things will allow you to select the best functionality for your organization, enabling you to leverage Datadog fully, and therefore it will be a good investment.
