We performed a comparison between Datadog and Grafana based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: Datadog offers impressive capabilities in dashboards, error reporting, ease of use, logs, and analysis, user-friendliness for development teams, and infrastructure monitoring. Grafana shines in creating visually appealing graphs, customization options, open-source nature, extensive visualization capabilities, import/export functionality, and capacity planning. Datadog has several areas for improvement including usability, integration, user interface intuitiveness, security features, organizational structure management, agent deployment, network monitoring, customization possibilities, and improved documentation for agent setup and debugging. Grafana could improve in data aggregation enhancement, expanding reporting types, logs integration for debugging, editing tool improvement, plugin capabilities expansion, and file-saving configuration improvement.
Service and Support: The opinions on Datadog's customer service are divided, as some users appreciate the quick and useful support, while others faced delays or unhelpful responses. Grafana's customer service has garnered positive feedback for being efficient and technically knowledgeable. Additionally, Grafana offers a valuable community forum for further assistance.
Ease of Deployment: Users generally find the initial setup for Datadog to be simple and uncomplicated, often with assistance from service providers or technical support. On the other hand, the initial setup for Grafana is mixed among users, as some find it easy while others report the need for resource optimization and tuning.
Pricing: Users express differing opinions on the pricing of Datadog, with some considering it expensive and others finding it reasonable compared to alternative solutions. Grafana provides a variety of choices, including a free open-source version, and offers moderately priced licensed options.
ROI: Users have different experiences with the ROI of Datadog, with some mentioned benefits such as time savings and reduced blind spots. On the other hand, Grafana is highly regarded for its data visualization and analytics capabilities.
Comparison Results: Grafana is the favored option when comparing it to Datadog. Users appreciate Grafana's customizable features, extensive visualization capabilities, and ability to create visually appealing graphs. The fact that Grafana is open source and cost-effective, with a supportive community, is also highly valued. Additionally, users find Grafana easy to use, with a friendly interface and helpful customer and technical support. Grafana's focus on data visualization and affordability makes it the preferred choice.
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"It has empowered all our platform engineers with a very powerful and easy to use monitoring system."
"The integration and configuration are incredibly simple. The SaaS offering is remarkably easy to set up, especially if you're coming from a Graphite environment or anything that uses a StatsD."
"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)."
"It is great that creating an incident is possible from Slack while having all the relevant data in Datadog."
"Datadog helps us detect issues early on and helps in troubleshooting."
"The seamless integration between Datadog and hundreds of apps makes onboarding new products and teams a breeze."
"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."
"The solution has good features."
"It is a stable, reliable product."
"Grafana is able to connect with multiple data sources, unlike Elasticsearch."
"The integration between Loki and Tempo is valuable."
"It is a stable solution."
"The installation process is easy. We have deployed it on the cloud. I have around 20 to 30 people using the solution in my company."
"The comparison feature is very good."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."
"Some of the interface is still confusing to use."
"I think better access to their engineers when we have a problem could be better."
"I would like better navigability across pages."
"We need more advanced querying against logs."
"Lately, chat support has a longer waiting time."
"I'm not sure what kind of features are in the roadmap right now, but I encourage the development of features for defining your organization, and allowing the visibility of what kind of metrics you can get. Those features would be really useful for us."
"Datadog could have a better business analysis module."
"We would really like to see more from the Service Catalog."
"One area for improvement in Grafana is that depending on your version, you have to pay for the features, making the license expensive. It would be great if the licensing model could be more flexible. In the next release of Grafana, I want cluster creation to be available, which would help in Grafana deployment and scaling. Currently, the scaling process for the solution is a bit complicated."
"The solution should include online support."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"The formatting could be better."
"I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients."
"It would be helpful if they simplified the data source."
"There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations."
Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews while Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while Grafana is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and SCOM, whereas Grafana is most compared with New Relic, Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace and ITRS Geneos. See our Datadog vs. Grafana 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.