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.
"Datadog has a lot of features to be able to drill down deep into the swath of logs that our platforms generate."
"The ease of correcting these dashboards and widgets when needed is amazing."
"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."
"The seamless integration between Datadog and hundreds of apps makes onboarding new products and teams a breeze."
"Datadog documentation on web pages has improved a lot and is pretty easy to follow and find."
"The solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments."
"The ingestion points are unlimited and support customization. We haven't had anything yet that we haven't been able to integrate with it."
"The tools are powerful and intuitive to set up."
"The cost is reasonable. It's not overly pricey."
"ELK is open-source, and it will give you the framework you need to build everything from scratch."
"We chose the product based on the ability to scan for malware using a malware behavioral model as opposed to just a traditional hash-based antivirus. Therefore, it's not as intensive."
"It is scalable."
"We like Elastic Security because it's a REST API-based solution. That's the primary reason we use it."
"ELK Logstash is easy and fast, at least for the initial setup with the out of box uses."
"Elastic Security is very customizable, and the dashboards are very easy to build."
"Elastic provides the capability to index quickly due to the reverse indexes it offers. This data is crucial as it contains critical information. The reverse index allows fast data indexing because of Elastic's efficient search engine."
"We need more integration functionality, including certain metrics integration."
"Its pricing model can be improved. Its settings should be improved for a better understanding of billing. They should also provide some alerts when there is an increase in the usage. For example, if there is 20% more increase from one week to another, the customer should get an alert."
"We need more visibility into the error tracking dashboard."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"The incident management beta looks promising, but it is still missing the ability to automatically create incidents based on certain alerts."
"The menu on the left is pretty dense (and I know it has to be). I never knew about the cmd+k functionality until recently. It would be helpful to offer more tips/cheat sheets to see handy shortcuts like that."
"The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade."
"The ease of implementation needs improvement."
"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."
"Technical support could respond faster."
"Upgrades currently released as stacks when it should be a plugin or an extension to save removal and reinstallation."
"Elastic has one problem. In the past, Elastic Security was free. Now, they currently only offer the basic license or a certain period of time."
"Elastic Security could improve the documentation. It would help if they were more simple and clean."
"The tool should improve its scalability."
"There isn't really a very good user experience. You need a lot of training."
"In terms of what could be improved with Elastic, in some use cases, especially on the advanced level, they are not ready made, so you'll have to write some scripts."
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?