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."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."
"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."
"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."
"The GUI is powerful and doesn't require scripting or regular expressions. It has a vast finder for correlation, which is easier than other tools like JMeter and LoadRunner. It's also easy to integrate with other tools with a separate execution environment. The tool is also easy to use."
"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."
"As always, within the IT industry, everybody's always looking to upgrade and update everything else like that. Apica has been one of those things but it's really hard to replace because it offers us the unique capability to see what the customer is seeing. A lot of other ones can do Selenium script and things like that, but there's a lot in Apica that we use right now. We utilize a lot of the scenario options in Apica right now, and there's a lot of other ones that do parts of it, but it doesn't do everything that Apica does."
"Our application SREs do script checks in such a way that closely mimic our customers' actions using the platform. Because there are so many different ways and options to be able to configure checks to closely mirror your applications' capabilities, it provides a lot of optionality for teams to create the right type of check that can notify when there are any issues. At the end of the day, we want our monitoring tools to be able to catch any outage before our customers do. This is where Apica Synthetic does a great job."
"What I like the most is that Apica can simulate different browsers and different versions of desktop or mobile browsers."
"Datadog has so far been a breeze to use and set up."
"APM is great and has provided low-effort out-of-the-box observability for various services."
"The ability to send notifications based on metadata from the monitor is helpful."
"Datadog has flexibility."
"I have found some of the most valuable features to be the way things all come together that gives us a point of view that is useful. The panel is very beautiful and customizable."
"We really like the charts and visualization."
"The fact that everything is under a single pane of glass is really valuable, as developers don't have to spend their time copying correlation IDs across tools to find what they need."
"The solution's SaaS model is easy to manage and works well in single- or multi-cloud environments."
"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."
"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."
"We could use more detailed information in the request and response sections."
"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."
"Apica should add more features and integrations with different tools and certain ticketing systems, like ServiceNow."
"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."
"I have noticed that the tool isn't widely recognized outside our organization. Also, there aren't any tutorials or dedicated resources for this tool, making it challenging for newcomers to learn. It would be beneficial if someone experienced with it could provide guidance."
"Datadog is so feature-rich that it is often hard to onboard new folks and tough to decide where to invest time."
"The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages."
"I've only been using Datadog for a few months, and at first, it was frankly overwhelming in terms of both the UI and the available capabilities."
"The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users."
"Lately, chat support has a longer waiting time."
"Sometimes, it takes a long time to load the dashboard if we have many charts."
"We have asked technical support questions, and sometimes they don't get back to us right away. Or when they do, it is not the right answer."
"I sometimes log in and see items changed, either in the UI or a feature enabled. To see it for the first time without proper communication can sometimes come as a shock."
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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