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.
"That visual representation’s been really good, also the overhead that AppDynamics creates is quite small. We've tried Dynatrace in the past. Some of the applications didn't work as well with Dynatrace."
"The most valuable feature is the detailed statistics, like the consumer count, for the ActiveMQ server."
"It is a stable solution."
"We're a large organization, so we appreciate AppDynamics' wide coverage. It may not work in all areas, but it has broad coverage. We can use the same dataset for different use case aspects. That is the beauty of AppDynamics. You can coordinate APM, EUM, and infrastructure through one dataset."
"The most valuable feature of AppDynamics is Proactive Monitoring and Alerting."
"It allows us to configure health rules so that we can, based on our own experience, determine when an application is behaving incorrectly."
"The initial setup is simple."
"It has improved my organization because we are able to proactively and reactively look at performance issues."
"Profiling has been made easier."
"Datadog's seamless integration with Slack and PagerDuty helped us to receive alerts right to the most common notification methods we use (our mobile devices and Slack)."
"The biggest thing I liked was the combination of all the things - monitoring, log aggregation, and profiling."
"The RUM solution has improved our ability to triage faster and hand more capabilities to our customer support."
"Excellent autocomplete for everything in the UI."
"The solution has helped our organization with custom events to track specific cases."
"The solution allows flexibility and heightened observability for presenting data, creating indicators, and setting service-level objectives."
"The observability pipelines are the most valuable aspect of the solution."
"SQL statement monitoring"
"I would like to see more artificial intelligence and machine learning brought in to monitor the statement and payment sum issues we have."
"AppDynamics' modules and hardware resources are very high."
"More native support for other hardware is needed because having to install various extensions and perform extra setup for different devices is really challenging, and not as easy or straightforward as it is in other products."
"It could be a little more flexible in configuration on the back end."
"The integration ability of AppDynamics with other performance testing tools is an area with shortcomings where improvements are required."
"Installation and configuration can be very tough. An average user without specialized knowledge can't do this. You need to have DevOps and QA teams handle it. During installation, a lot of customers get stuck trying to track the database or the API part, and they have to contact customer support."
"As per my experience, the drill-down feature can be improved at the class level."
"More granular control over dashboard sharing. Timeboard sharing."
"Datadog is expensive."
"The ease of implementation needs improvement."
"ECS could be improved by including more tutorials for beginners to reduce the barriers to entry."
"Auto instrumentation on tracing has not been very easy to find in the documentation."
"The incident management beta looks promising, but it is still missing the ability to automatically create incidents based on certain alerts."
"We need more integration with security tools like Drata."
"Additional metrics should be included."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 153 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 Elastic Observability. See our AppDynamics vs. Datadog report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability 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