We performed a comparison between Amazon CloudWatch and Datadog based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Datadog ultimately won out in this comparison. According to reviews, Datadog appears to be a more comprehensive and high performing solution. Amazon CloudWatch does come out on top in the setup and pricing categories, however.
"The solution gives us very good real-time data."
"We can set CPU thresholds using the solution."
"It is a stable solution...I rate the technical support a ten out of ten."
"We use Amazon CloudWatch for logging."
"Most of it's around optimizing utilization, their cloud utilization. They're making sure that they're getting the most out of their in-cloud environments and their instances. Making sure that there's no strange behavior in the environment."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is reliability."
"I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there."
"I have found the memory metrics and the CPU metrics valuable."
"It has a nice UI."
"The tool's deployment is easy."
"APM and tracing are super useful."
"Datadog's ability to group and visualize the servers and the data makes it relatively easy for the root cause analysis."
"APM is great and has provided low-effort out-of-the-box observability for various services."
"We have way more observability than what we had before - on the application and the overall system."
"Datadog's log aggregation is really helpful since it lets me and every other engineer on my team login, view, and share logs when we need to debug our application."
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"Some of our customers want to use Kubernetes to monitor their CICD flow but Amazon CloudWatch does not support it. We need to use another solution, such as Datadog or Dynatrace has the needed capability."
"The technical support must be improved."
"The dashboard of Amazon CloudWatch is not very customizable right now."
"I found several areas for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch. First is that it's tough to track issues and find out where it's going wrong. The process takes longer. For example, if I get an exception error, I read the logs, search, go to AWS Cloud, then to the groups to find the keyword to determine what's wrong. Another area for improvement in Amazon CloudWatch is that it's slow in terms of log streaming. It requires an entire twenty-four hours for scanning, rather than just one hour. This issue can be solved with Elasticsearch streaming with Kibana, but it requires a lot of development effort and integration with Kibana or Splunk, and this also means I need a separate developer and software technical stack to do the indexing and streaming to Kibana. It's a manual effort that you need to do properly, so log streaming should be improved in Amazon CloudWatch. The AWS support person should also have a better understanding of the logs in Amazon CloudWatch. What I'd like added to the solution is a more advanced search function, particularly one that can tell you more information or special information. Right now, the search function is difficult to use because it only gives you limited data. For example, I got an error message saying that the policy wasn't created. I only know the amount the customer paid for the policy, the mobile number, and the customer name, but if I use those details, the information won't show up on the logs. I need to enter more details, so that's the type of fuzzy matching Amazon CloudWatch won't provide. If this type of search functionality is provided, it will be very helpful for businesses and companies that provide professional services to customers, like ours."
"I think something that can be improved are the alerts and alerting mechanism based on no rejects. We want to have it more flexible and that is one of the key things that is required."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing, because they have a premium version, but it's not really a premium version. It's just an enhanced monitoring version, and it can be a bit expensive depending on your usage."
"The product’s documentation must be improved."
"The solution's integration could be easier for laypersons."
"I often have issues with the UI in my browser."
"The real issue with this product is cost control."
"It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features."
"When I started using it years ago, it had stability problems. I remember, specifically, we ran everything in Docker containers. There were some problems getting it into a Docker container with very specific memory limits."
"More pre-configured "Monitor Alerts" would be helpful."
"I would like better navigability across pages."
"Datadog could have a better business analysis module."
"It would be great if usage metrics were automatically created and we could create custom metrics, instead we ended up building some of our own stuff to track and alert on our own usage."
Amazon CloudWatch is ranked 9th in Cloud Monitoring Software with 40 reviews while Datadog is ranked 1st in Cloud Monitoring Software with 137 reviews. Amazon CloudWatch is rated 8.0, while Datadog is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Amazon CloudWatch writes "Instantaneous response when monitoring logs and KPIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". Amazon CloudWatch is most compared with Zabbix, Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), Dynatrace, SolarWinds NPM and Nagios XI, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Coralogix. See our Amazon CloudWatch vs. Datadog report.
See our list of best Cloud Monitoring Software vendors and best Log Management vendors.
We monitor all Cloud Monitoring Software 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.