We performed a comparison between AppDynamics vs Datadog based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: AppDynamics has an edge in this comparison because it received higher marks in the ease of deployment, pricing, and ROI categories.
"The most valuable feature in AppDynamics is the identifying of the slow responses. Additionally, it is easy to use."
"I find troubleshooting is quicker because we can drill down into the end points and see which endpoints are getting critical. Visibility-wise, the micro details are easy to find."
"I like that AppDynamics allows every organization to have what they want to see, like for my organization, we're able to customize the dashboard to show us details of what we want to see in our transactions."
"This solution not only provides answers but also provides sensor data. This allows us to quickly resolve issues that developers may take a long time to solve."
"Applications: This provides us insight into how our applications are performing within our environments and affords us the ability to identify opportunities and make changes to code / environment to effect positive performance lift."
"AppDynamics is scalable."
"The initial setup is simple."
"I have found the main feature of the solution to be its ability to analyze an application's code to see where there are issues. Additionally, it is easy to use and configure."
"The solution has helped out organization gain improved visibility."
"The solution is useful for monitoring logs."
"APM is great and has provided low-effort out-of-the-box observability for various services."
"It has turned into an operational dashboard. If you felt something is going wrong, you can immediately open up Datadog. It has been our go to application because we know the answer will be there."
"The most valuable features are the dashboards and the reporting."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"Anything I've wanted to do, I found a way to get it done through Datadog."
"Datadog has flexibility."
"There are many KPIs that are not available in AppDynamics."
"AppDynamics is new to the cloud and could improve its cloud services, they are following a monolithic monitoring approach."
"The infrastructure is not as good as other solutions."
"This solution is expensive."
"I would like them to change their business model for scalability to accommodate growing companies. The business model should be more flexible."
"The GUI can be overwhelming at first to a novice Dev or Ops support person, and the possible root causes of an issue do not bubble up to the first screen you see."
"When you have high stress of visits I do not know if you are more stress because of the amount of visits or because you have to wait eternal 60 seconds to find out it things are going well or you already have mess."
"The solution could improve by covering more technologies. For example, it does support .NET Core applications. However, it could be a bit better."
"I often have issues with the UI in my browser."
"Some of the interface is still confusing to use."
"The current way accounts are billed could be vastly improved - especially when involving multiple organizations across multiple accounts in combination with reserved commitments."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"More granular control over dashboard sharing. Timeboard sharing."
"Since the Datadog platform has so many separate features, solving so many use cases, there are often inconsistencies in feature availability and interoperability between products."
"The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages."
"It would be ideal if the product offered a bit more monitoring from our dashboard."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 155 reviews while Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while Datadog is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Splunk Enterprise Security, New Relic and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Splunk Enterprise Security. See our AppDynamics vs. Datadog report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors and best Container Monitoring vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability 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.
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitoring. We maintain critical processing on our mainframe so there was a desire to include this in our transaction trace. Due to a highly mature ELK implementation, we are not trying to incorporate log analytics into solution buy may consider in the future. We had AppD, Dynatrace, New Relic, and CA Wily all in house at the time of our evaluation. We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing. Between Dynatrace and New Relic, Dynatrace won based on the automation, integrated AI, support for "old" techs, and confidence we could eliminate multiple APM and infra monitoring tools.
I would not include products like BigPanda, MoogSoft, in this analysis. They are not monitoring solutions but event correlation solutions. You will need additional monitoring products to capture data and feed them. Having said that if you cannot consolidate tools you will likely need to purchase an event solution to make sense of all the alarms. We did evaluate these products but with Dynatrace AI did not feel the business value was there for the investment.
Here's a quick pro/con list on Dynatrace & New Relic from our analysis.
New Relic Pros: Insights is an awesome product and capability. Lots of capabilities and plugins to extend data collection. The APM dashboard is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Good training and documentation are available to support the product.
New Relic Cons: Requires lots of manual configurations to implement and support. Insights product requires an investment of time to achieve value. Licensing is a nightmare as there is virtually no transparency in what you are being charged for. Lack of solution to consolidate alerts across implementation other than significant investment in insights to manually achieve this.
Dynatrace Pros: Very simple to implement and maintain with out of the box automation which supports modern (cloud/Kubernetes) and "old" (mainframe). In-app chat is helpful. High integration of infra and APM data for full-stack observability and engineering. Topology and trace discovery is more reliable than other products or our CMDB. Synthetics are easy to set up for any user. AI-assisted problem analysis on the trace discovery streamlines troubleshooting. AI includes "events" in an analysis like VMotion, deployment events. Have not done yet but looking to leverage monitoring as code for a fully integrated and automated delivery pipeline. See keptn.sh open source project.
Dynatrace Cons: User SQL lacks some functions of NRQL for user analysis. Host, process, and service data is not available to query within the product. Alarm processing lacks some granular controls. The Plug-in library is less robust.
Good luck with your decision!
We are currently going through a paper-based analysis to select an Enterprise APM solution.
Our Contenders are
1. Dynatrace
2. Cisco(AppDynamics)
3. Broadcom DX-APM
Shortlisted based on existing relationships with other products and services they provide.
We discounted New Relic- despite their growing capability - as they are yet to enter the enterprise APM solution scene.
With regards to your response "We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing .." :
Will you be willing to expand on Appd - what was your experience and issues w.r.t licensing. These could help us with our evaluation. Much appreciated. Regards Adrian
Could you please share your requirements ? There are a lot tools can be added to the list. I spent almost 6 months to test and check many tools then I select eG enterprise.
Thanks