We performed a comparison between Datadog and Elastic Security (formerly ELK Logstash) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Datadog and Elastic Security have a similar user rating for ease of deployment, and users of both felt that the solutions were expensive. Users felt Elastic Security took too long to respond when it came to service and support. In terms of features, reviewers of Datadog had a problem with stability and felt there wasn’t enough monitoring through their dashboard. Reviewers of Elastic Security said they had difficulty retrieving data and felt the solution should offer predictive maintenance.
"The Datadog suite has allowed us to easily integrate log collection into all of our services and quickly detect unexpected changes in system data to declare security incidents."
"Integrating Datadog with other platforms has made our monitoring processes a bit easier. It's not super simple, but it's manageable."
"Since we integrated Datadog, we have had increased confidence in the quality of our service, and we had an easier time increasing our delivery velocity."
"The many dozens of integrations that the solution brings out of the box are excellent."
"By moving to Datadog, we did not need to manage our own monitoring infrastructure anymore."
"Most of the features in the way Datadog does monitoring are commendable and that is the reason we choose it. We did some comparisons before picking Datadog. Datadog was recommended based on the features provided."
"The flexibility to create notebooks and dashboards and fully customize them gives us a lot of power to track the exact services and endpoints we are working on."
"For us to have visibility into our app stack and the hardware we run has been highly beneficial."
"The feature that we have found the most valuable is scalability."
"The most valuable feature is the search function, which allows me to go directly to the target to see the specific line a customer is searching for."
"Elastic is straightforward, easy to integrate, and highly customizable."
"The most valuable thing is that this solution is widely used for work management and research. It's easy to jump into the security use case with the same technology."
"We like Elastic Security because it's a REST API-based solution. That's the primary reason we use it."
"It's open-source and free to use."
"It can handle millions of loads at a time, and you can always use the filters to find exactly what you are looking for and detect errors in every log message you are searching for, basically."
"Enables monitoring of application performance and the ability to predict behaviors."
"As a new customer, the Datadog user interface is a bit daunting."
"When it comes to storing the logs with Datadog, I'm not sure why it costs so much to store gigabytes or terabytes of information when it's a fraction of the cost to do so myself."
"The more tools that they can build that allow you to run AWX playbooks, or other similar fixes, would benefit clients greatly."
"This service could be less costly."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"The setup was a bit complex."
"Federated views for Datadog dashboards are critical as large companies utilize multiple instances of the product and cannot link the metrics or correlate the metrics together. This stunts the usage of Datadog."
"One limitation of Elastic Security is that it does not have built-in workflows for all tasks. For example, if you need a workflow for compliance, you will need to create a custom workflow."
"The solution does not have a UI and this is one of the reasons we are looking for another solution."
"One thing they could add is a quick step to enable users who don't have a solid background to build a dashboard and quickly search, without difficulty."
"The solution's query building is not that intuitive compared to other solutions."
"The solution needs to be more reactive to investigations. We need to be able to detect and prevent any attacks before it can damage our infrastructure. Currently, this solution doesn't offer that."
"The interface could be more user friendly because it is sometimes hard to deal with."
"Email notification should be done the same way as Logentries does it."
"If the documentation were improved and made more clear for beginners, or even professionals, then we would be more attracted to this solution."
Datadog is ranked 3rd in Log Management with 137 reviews while Elastic Security is ranked 5th in Log Management with 59 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Elastic Security is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Elastic Security writes "A stable and scalable tool that provides visibility along with the consolidation of logs to its users". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Elastic Observability, whereas Elastic Security is most compared with Wazuh, Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Sentinel, IBM Security QRadar and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. See our Datadog vs. Elastic Security report.
See our list of best Log Management vendors.
We monitor all Log Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
It depends on your requirement. If you are looking for a SIEM/log management solution ELK would be a better option.
But if you are looking for more of a monitoring solution Datadog would be better. Also, Datadog provides out-of-the-box integrations with a lot of cloud applications. ELK could be cost-effective but a bit challenging to configure & finetune.
Datadog: Unify logs, metrics, and traces from across your distributed infrastructure. Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
Datadog features offered are:
200+ turn-key integrations for data aggregation
Clean graphs of StatsD and other integrations
Elasticsearch: Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine. Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack).
Elasticsearch provides the following key features:
Distributed and Highly Available Search Engine.
Multi Tenant with Multi Types.
Various set of APIs including RESTful
Dear,
Unfortunately, I can't say much about Datadog but I have used ELK for a short period.
And I can tell you not everything works the way it should. For example, I noticed heavy CPU usage for a Windows client on MS AD servers. I advise you to consider this if it's important to you.
Good luck!
Where do you want to spend your money, on people or licenses?
ELK requires a long-term investment in engineering resources to manage the system and to provide the capability.
Datadog provides capabilities for you so you only need some administrators. What are the capabilities? Some critical ones include availability, scalability, consuming log files, platform upgrades, ...
If you are consuming smaller data sets (100's of GB) with shorter retention, the size and scaling are much easier making ELK easier.
Do you have admins or engineers? If your team doesn't have dedicated time & skills to spend developing solutions like elastic-alert you should look for a vendor to provide capabilities.
I expect some capabilities in Datadog you will not be able to replicate in ELK.... so that answer makes this obvious.
We are going to evaluate the same for our org. We do about 10 TB a day consumption in ELK and are looking to see if we can shift $$$ from engineers and infra to SaaS.
I have used both ELK and Datadog, and there are lots of variables to consider here. The three important points that I looked at are:
- Cost. In addition to service costs, you have to consider egress and ingress costs as well.
- Real-time observability that you need during development vs long-term Observability. Keep in mind, when you export data over the internet, it comes with the same reliability issues as any other service on the internet. Regardless of how Datadog classifies its service as real-time, it is not real-time, IMO. It very much depends on your definition of real-time.
- Deployment and maintenance complexity. When your ELK cluster grows it has some pain points you need to be aware of.
My general approach is to deploy ELK for development, tune the data, and then pivot toward commercial solutions if I need to. This gives you insight into your data and what you should be preserving and that way you are not paying high costs, when or if you do decide to take advantage of a commercial solution.
Can you tell me what you actually want to do so that I can help you?