We performed a comparison between Datadog and Elastic Security (formerly ELK Logstash) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Datadog and Elastic Security have a similar user rating for ease of deployment, and users of both felt that the solutions were expensive. Users felt Elastic Security took too long to respond when it came to service and support. In terms of features, reviewers of Datadog had a problem with stability and felt there wasn’t enough monitoring through their dashboard. Reviewers of Elastic Security said they had difficulty retrieving data and felt the solution should offer predictive maintenance.
"Flame graphs are pretty useful for understanding how GraphQL resolves our federated queries when it comes to identifying slow points in our requests. In our microservice environment with 170 services."
"Datadog helps us detect issues early on and helps in troubleshooting."
"Datadog documentation on web pages has improved a lot and is pretty easy to follow and find."
"We have hundreds of microservices, and knowing how top-level requests weave throughout all of them is invaluable."
"The product has offered increased visibility via logging APM, metrics, RUM, etc."
"The visibility into our network has allowed for quick diagnosis of failures, identification of underutilized or over-utilized resources, and allowed for cloud cost optimization opportunities."
"We find they have a very helpful alert system."
"Datadog is easy to use and easy to deploy. It's a better solution compared to others on the market in terms of being budget friendly for our customers."
"It can handle millions of loads at a time, and you can always use the filters to find exactly what you are looking for and detect errors in every log message you are searching for, basically."
"It is the best open-source product for people working in SO, managing and analyzing logs."
"I use the stack every morning to check the errors and it's just so clear. I don't see any disadvantage to using Logstash."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Security is that you can install agents, and they are not separately licensed."
"Its flexibility is most valuable. We can have a number of scenarios, and we can get logs from anything. If we know how to use Logstash, we can tweak it in many ways. This makes the logging search on Elastic very easy."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to collect authentication information from service providers."
"I can look at events from more than one source across multiple different locations and find patterns or anomalies. The machine learning capabilities are helpful, and I can create rules for notifications to be more proactive rather than responding after something has gone wrong."
"It's very stable and reliable."
"We would really like to see more from the Service Catalog."
"Their security features could be improved. We looked at their Security Monitoring feature but it was early in its development. Datadog are just getting into the security space so I'm sure this will improve in the future."
"Datadog could always lower the price!"
"I'm not sure if Datadog can monitor K8s deployments in real-time. For instance, being able to see a deployment step by step visually. This would be helpful if there were any incidents during the deployment."
"There is occasional UI slowness and bugs."
"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."
"We need more advanced querying against logs."
"Its pricing model can be improved. Its settings should be improved for a better understanding of billing. They should also provide some alerts when there is an increase in the usage. For example, if there is 20% more increase from one week to another, the customer should get an alert."
"The tool needs to integrate with legacy servers. Big companies can have legacy servers that may not always be updated."
"There are connectors to gather logs for Windows PCs and Linux PCs, but if we have to get the logs from Syslog then we have to do it manually, and this should be automated."
"We are paying dearly for the guy who is working on the ELK Stack. That knowledge is quite rare and hard to come by. For difficulty and availability of resources, I would rate it a five out of 10."
"With Elastic, you have to build the use cases for the specific requirement. Other products have a simple integration and more use cases to integrate out-of-the-box solutions for SIEM."
"It is difficult to anticipate and understand the space utilization, so more clarity there would be great."
"An area for improvement in Elastic Security is the pricing. It could be better. Right now, when you increase the volume of logs to be collected, the price also increases a lot."
"One thing they could add is a quick step to enable users who don't have a solid background to build a dashboard and quickly search, without difficulty."
"Elastic Security could improve the documentation. It would help if they were more simple and clean."
Datadog is ranked 3rd in Log Management with 137 reviews while Elastic Security is ranked 5th in Log Management with 58 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Elastic Security is rated 7.6. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Elastic Security writes "A stable and scalable tool that provides visibility along with the consolidation of logs to its users". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Elastic Observability, whereas Elastic Security is most compared with Wazuh, Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Sentinel, IBM Security QRadar and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. See our Datadog vs. Elastic Security report.
See our list of best Log Management vendors.
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It depends on your requirement. If you are looking for a SIEM/log management solution ELK would be a better option.
But if you are looking for more of a monitoring solution Datadog would be better. Also, Datadog provides out-of-the-box integrations with a lot of cloud applications. ELK could be cost-effective but a bit challenging to configure & finetune.
Datadog: Unify logs, metrics, and traces from across your distributed infrastructure. Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
Datadog features offered are:
200+ turn-key integrations for data aggregation
Clean graphs of StatsD and other integrations
Elasticsearch: Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine. Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack).
Elasticsearch provides the following key features:
Distributed and Highly Available Search Engine.
Multi Tenant with Multi Types.
Various set of APIs including RESTful
Dear,
Unfortunately, I can't say much about Datadog but I have used ELK for a short period.
And I can tell you not everything works the way it should. For example, I noticed heavy CPU usage for a Windows client on MS AD servers. I advise you to consider this if it's important to you.
Good luck!
Where do you want to spend your money, on people or licenses?
ELK requires a long-term investment in engineering resources to manage the system and to provide the capability.
Datadog provides capabilities for you so you only need some administrators. What are the capabilities? Some critical ones include availability, scalability, consuming log files, platform upgrades, ...
If you are consuming smaller data sets (100's of GB) with shorter retention, the size and scaling are much easier making ELK easier.
Do you have admins or engineers? If your team doesn't have dedicated time & skills to spend developing solutions like elastic-alert you should look for a vendor to provide capabilities.
I expect some capabilities in Datadog you will not be able to replicate in ELK.... so that answer makes this obvious.
We are going to evaluate the same for our org. We do about 10 TB a day consumption in ELK and are looking to see if we can shift $$$ from engineers and infra to SaaS.
I have used both ELK and Datadog, and there are lots of variables to consider here. The three important points that I looked at are:
- Cost. In addition to service costs, you have to consider egress and ingress costs as well.
- Real-time observability that you need during development vs long-term Observability. Keep in mind, when you export data over the internet, it comes with the same reliability issues as any other service on the internet. Regardless of how Datadog classifies its service as real-time, it is not real-time, IMO. It very much depends on your definition of real-time.
- Deployment and maintenance complexity. When your ELK cluster grows it has some pain points you need to be aware of.
My general approach is to deploy ELK for development, tune the data, and then pivot toward commercial solutions if I need to. This gives you insight into your data and what you should be preserving and that way you are not paying high costs, when or if you do decide to take advantage of a commercial solution.
Can you tell me what you actually want to do so that I can help you?