We performed a comparison between Apica and Datadog based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It helps with releases because we monitor them in staging. We can tell if something is critically wrong before it gets into production, e.g., if it was load related or function related and also what was different in the dev stage. It then alerts us straightaway inside of our production monitors once it has been released. Therefore, it has improved how we run our systems since we monitor multiple environments."
"From our standpoint, there are a number of valuable features. The WebHooks are obviously really great. The alert framework is really good and then the reporting and visualizations that you get from the dashboards is good. Those three areas are primarily what my team's focused on in terms of usage from day to day."
"It uses a basic scripting language, which is easy to learn and customize as needed. Compared to LoadRunner, I found writing and customizing code much easier in Apica."
"What I like the most is that Apica can simulate different browsers and different versions of desktop or mobile browsers."
"You can tell from the operational space of people who are using and consuming this data that they are more integrated. It is not dependent on one team anymore. It saves a lot of time by capturing and pinpointing the exact problem that is happening quickly. We have moved from getting escalations manually to getting escalations synthetically."
"With the ZebraTester, the ability to have and store dynamic variables, when setting up the monitors, means you can extract that value and use it in a subsequent service call. This is something that has made our lives easier... This is one of the features that I like the most because it helps us in configuring these services, in a certain flow, without the need to re-record the whole thing."
"We see the benefit almost every day. It allows us to be alerted whenever there is a store that is not responding properly around the world. We do have a network operation center (NOC) who receives these alerts, immediately checking if everything is okay."
"It is easy for beginners to learn and use Apica."
"Its logs are most valuable."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"The ingestion points are unlimited and support customization. We haven't had anything yet that we haven't been able to integrate with it."
"Datadog dashboards are pretty great."
"Having a clear view, not only of our infrastructure but our apps and services as well, has brought a great added value to our customers."
"The solution has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"Datadog provides tracing and logging, whereas Dynatrace focuses on tracing, and Splunk is more of a logging tool. Datadog's advantage is that we don't need two tools."
"The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"Learning the tool has always been a little difficult from a scripting perspective because the framework is proprietary and unique. Once we became used to what it does and how to perform it, then it became easier for my team and me. I would like to see some of the testing steps be part of a more well-known language, like Java or Python. That would be a big improvement."
"We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement."
"Apica was a relatively new tool when I started using it. Although Apica had good documentation, it still felt less developed or advanced than a tool like LoadRunner."
"If you are adding any input file, the tool fails to capture the path."
"The having to install an application on your desktop to utilize something like ZebraTester is a little cumbersome. It would be nice to see that become a web-based application. Having the documentation a little more accessible, and easier to digest by people who are just learning how to use the framework, especially when it comes to more complex or more edge-based cases would be really helpful to have."
"Alerting needs improvement. It's a little noisy. It needs some better options. Currently, they have an issue, when you set up a synthetic monitor, you can set up where it's monitoring from, a data center that Apica owns."
"The accuracy of alerts can be improved a little bit. Right now, it's pretty good in terms of alerting pretty quickly about failures or changes in response times. However, what we have seen happen is the number of alerts that we are getting is very frequent, and we would like to tone down the number of alerts. That's the only trouble we have. Apica could tone down those settings because there is no option for us to tone it down to a level that would reduce the alerts to a minimum. As a platform, it does send us good alerts, but it could be improved a bit."
"The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them."
"We would like to see smaller or shorter tutorials and video sessions."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."
"Datadog lacks a deeper application-level insight. Their competitors had eclipsed them in offering ET functionality that was important to us. That's why we stopped using it and switched to New Relic. Datadog's price is also high."
"Lacks some flexibility in the customization."
"The incident management beta looks promising, but it is still missing the ability to automatically create incidents based on certain alerts."
"The pricing should be less of a surprise."
"The way data is represented can be limiting. When I first tried it out a long time ago, you could graph a metric and another metric, and they'd overlay, but you couldn't take the ratio between the two."
Apica is ranked 45th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 6 reviews while Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews. Apica is rated 8.2, while Datadog is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Apica writes "Offers transcript download feature and easy to set up and configure tests but not very user friendly". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". Apica is most compared with Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Apache JMeter and OpenText LoadRunner Cloud, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Elastic Observability. See our Apica vs. Datadog report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors and best Log Management vendors.
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