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.
"I can put it in a simple term, its simplicity is always there."
"The tool's UI is good. One can scroll through the logs very easily."
"The initial setup is easy."
"Our team finds it overall quite useful."
"It offers direct integrations with various storage providers, making it convenient to push logs from CloudWatch to these external platforms."
"The most valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch is its ease of use and logs. You do not have to go to each separate system to see the logs, such as Syslog and they are located in one dashboard GUI."
"What I found most valuable in Amazon CloudWatch is that it gives you detailed information, which I found helpful because it can even provide you with data for the past one minute, which is quite granular. That was what helped me most in terms of finding the root causes. Task automation is another valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch."
"CloudWatch immediately hooks up and connects to the KPIs and all the metrics."
"We have found that we're able to get in and out of troubleshooting issues much more rapidly, which in turn, of course, enables us to spend more time on our products."
"The solution has helped our organization with custom events to track specific cases."
"I don't have to worry about upgrades with the AWS version."
"Its integration definitely stands out. It provides seamless monitoring of all our systems, services, apps, and whatever else we secure and monitor. Visualizations have become simpler with dashboards. We are getting visibility into systems, services, and apps stack through a single pane of glass, which is good. We are able to put logs in context."
"The integration into AWS is key as well as our software is currently bound to AWS."
"We find they have a very helpful alert system."
"The interface and the integrations make it so easy to connect to the cloud or to the on-premise environment."
"The web app has a real-time support chat window in which a support engineer is chatting with you within a minute."
"There's a learning curve with Amazon CloudWatch since we have to learn to write the queries to extract the keys and logs."
"For monitoring applications or for APM, CloudWatch has some limitations. You cannot monitor application performance from CloudWatch, and you have to go for a third-party tool."
"CloudWatch doesn’t monitor disk throughput by default."
"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."
"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."
"CloudWatch's scalability could be improved."
"It's not an advanced way of monitoring."
"There is room for improvement in terms of stability."
"We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems."
"I want to applaud the efforts in making the UI extremely usable and approachable. My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus."
"The parallel editing of the dashboards should not cause users to lose the work of another person."
"It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience."
"More pre-configured "Monitor Alerts" would be helpful."
"They could have better log reporting."
"At the beginning, when we started throwing logs at it, there was a bit of hiccup. However, this was during their beta period, so hiccups were expected."
"This service could be less costly."
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.