Datadog vs IBM Security QRadar comparison

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Datadog Logo
24,253 views|14,438 comparisons
95% willing to recommend
IBM Logo
15,094 views|9,166 comparisons
91% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 23, 2023

We performed a comparison between IBM Security QRadar and Datadog based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Features: QRadar users say the solution provides extensive information and helpful leads for locating pertinent data. QRadar stands out with its comprehensive network visibility and strong SIEM capabilities. Datadog users like its customizable displays, error tracking, and advanced AI/ML capabilities. QRadar could improve its rule deployment and lower its false positive rate. Users would also like expanded storage capacity, streamlined user management, and a more mature architecture.  Datadog could enhance its usability and reduce its learning curve. Users said integration was another pain point.

  • Service and Support: Some QRadar customers have had trouble connecting with knowledgeable support staff and experienced delayed responses. While many users spoke highly of Datadog’s support team, others reported slow support, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.

  • Ease of Deployment: QRadar's initial setup can be complex for users without expertise, and the difficulty may vary depending on the size of the data set. Datadog’s setup is considered straightforward, and users often receive help from a partner or vendor.

  • Pricing: QRadar can be costly because users need to buy new hardware to upgrade. Opinions about Datadog's price are divided. Some users found it costly, but others thought it was acceptable. Some said the pricing model could be clearer and better explained.

  • ROI: QRadar delivers a high return on investment, improving security through its advanced user behavior analytics. Users said Datadog saved them time and improved visibility into security blind spots.

Conclusion: Users appreciate its straightforward initial setup, comprehensive documentation, and reliable support. The valuable features offered by Datadog, including dashboards, reporting, error reporting, and log centralization, are highly praised. It is also user-friendly for development teams and offers flexibility with additional features such as AI and ML capabilities. In terms of pricing, Datadog is considered reasonable compared to other solutions. Users find its customer service and support to be helpful and responsive.
To learn more, read our detailed Datadog vs. IBM Security QRadar Report (Updated: April 2024).
770,616 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It provides more cloud data. They tend to just get the way a service would be designed on the cloud.""Sometimes it's more user friendly for development teams. There are some parts of Datadog that are more understandable for development teams. For example, the APM in Datadog works more manually and works like the tools in New Relic or Grafana, or Elastic. It is easier to understand for software development teams.""We like the distributed tracing and flame graphs for debugging. This has been invaluable for us during periods of high traffic or red alert conditions.""Even if we don't end up using Datadog, it revealed problems and optimizations to us that weren't obvious before.""The integration into AWS is key as well as our software is currently bound to AWS.""It has turned into an operational dashboard. If you felt something is going wrong, you can immediately open up Datadog. It has been our go to application because we know the answer will be there.""The feature I have found most valuable is when I can reuse existing monitors and alerts for new dashboards.""The most useful feature is the APM."

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"Search capabilities are sufficient for most tasks.""The threat protection network is the most valuable feature, because when you get an offense, you can actually trace it back to where it originated from, how it originated, and why.""The interface is good.""It'll get you from point A to B.""The most valuable feature is user behavior analytics (UBA).""The event collector, flow collector, PCAP and SOAR are valuable.""It does good correlation for events. It does good general analysis, and it has good apps as well.""The most valuable feature is the QRadar Vulnerability Manager which provides vulnerability scans. In addition, I like the way QRadar generates alerts."

More IBM Security QRadar Pros →

Cons
"Datadog is expensive.""It would also be nice if we had more insight into our own usage of Datadog (agents and custom metrics). They provide a usage page which does help, but it is not in real-time.""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.""It can have a more modernized pricing mechanism. We're actually working with them to figure out how to become more modular and have a better and more modernized pricing mechanism. The issue with Datadog is that you have to buy the whole suite of different products, and you kind of get stuck in the old utilization of 40% of their suite. Most organizations today break down between application development, networking, and security. Therefore, there should be a way to break down different modules into just app dev, infosec, networking, etc. Customers have various needs across their business lines, and sometimes, they're just not willing to have tools that they're not using 100%. AppDynamics is probably a little bit better in terms of being modular.""When I started using it years ago, it had stability problems. I remember, specifically, we ran everything in Docker containers. There were some problems getting it into a Docker container with very specific memory limits.""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.""The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users."

More Datadog Cons →

"The advanced planning management (APM) features should be included.""The solution is highly used here in Pakistan and in many sectors, they could improve it by having more SIEM connectors.""It is very difficult to activate all of the network equipment, and it would help if it were made easier.""Before we didn't have any security issues but recently a few of the user emails were hacked. We had to actually recreate their emails for them.""The playbook guide which specifies the rules for security use cases needs to be provided to support in case the organization needs help.""The whole process for support is something that needs to be improved.""Technical support really needs to be improved. Right now, they aren't where they need to be at all.""SOAR is what is expected the most from QRadar. They have something called SOAR Resilient, and it would be great if that gets induced in SIEM. IBM QRadar (as well as McAfee ESM) should have analytics platform integration. Currently, SIEMs don't have full-fledged integration with analytics where we are able to dump our data in SIEM, and the same data can be called from different analytics applications. We should be able to bring this data to a platform like Hadoop for big data and run the analytics there. Currently, people are seeing the past data and taking some actions in the present, but when it comes to analytics, there should be futuristic data where you can predict something out of your present and past data. Apart from that, I would like to see a full-fledged ITSM tool in QRadar. It sometimes has some technical issues that need to be checked. It requires a dedicated QRadar engineer to completely manage it. It has different module sets, such as event collector and event processor, and some technical glitches come in between. It takes the log but doesn't exactly process it in the way we want."

More IBM Security QRadar Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "​Pricing seems reasonable. It depends on the size of your organization, the size of your infrastructure, and what portion of your overall business costs go toward infrastructure."
  • "It has always scaled for us. Cost scales up too, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's reasonable for what they're providing."
  • "Pricing and licensing are reasonable for what they give you. You get the first five hosts free, which is fun to play around with. Then it's about four dollars a month per host, which is very affordable for what you get out of it. We have a lot of hosts that we put a lot of custom metrics into, and every host gives you an allowance for the number of custom metrics."
  • "At my last company, we did see ROI, specifically around response time. We could get to mission critical things that were down and losing revenue on immediately. So, the product paid itself back."
  • "The pricing and licensing through AWS Marketplace has been good. It would be nice if it was cheaper, but their pricing is reasonable for what it is. Sometimes, for their newer features, they charge as if it's fully fleshed out, even though it is a newer feature and it may have less stuff than their other items."
  • "It costs the same amount it would if we were hosting it ourselves, so we are incredibly happy with the cost."
  • "The pricing came up a bit compared to their competitors. It is not that the price has risen, but that the competitors have gone down. They keep adding more features that I would have expected to be baked in at a more nominal price. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the pricing, but not enough to jump ship."
  • "It didn't scale well from the cost perspective. We had a custom package deal."
  • More Datadog Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "found other solutions, with more features at the same cost or less. You don’t have to leave the Gartner Magic Quadrant to beat their price."
  • "Most of the time, it is easier and cheaper to buy a new product or the QRadar box."
  • "IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
  • "IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
  • "Go through a vulnerability assessment review for price breaks. A virtualized solution will also cut down on cost."
  • "It is expensive. It is not a product that I can provide for SMBs. It is a program that I can only provide for really large enterprises."
  • "The maintenance costs are high."
  • "Pricing (based on EPS) will be more accurate."
  • More IBM Security QRadar Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Vinod Shankar
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:With Datadog, we have near-live visibility across our entire platform. We have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately using the dashboards we have created with Datadog; they are very good core… more »
    Top Answer:Our organization ran comparison tests to determine whether the Datadog or Dynatrace network monitoring software was the better fit for us. We decided to go with Dynatrace. Dynatrace offers network… more »
    Top Answer:It mostly depends on your use-cases and environment. Exabeam and Securonix have a stronger UEBA feature set, friendlier GUI and are not licensed based on capacity (amount of logs and information… more »
    Top Answer:For tools I’d recommend:  -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also,… more »
    Top Answer:The event collector, flow collector, PCAP and SOAR are valuable.
    Ranking
    3rd
    out of 95 in Log Management
    Views
    24,253
    Comparisons
    14,438
    Reviews
    94
    Average Words per Review
    432
    Rating
    8.6
    6th
    out of 95 in Log Management
    Views
    15,094
    Comparisons
    9,166
    Reviews
    29
    Average Words per Review
    487
    Rating
    7.6
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, QRadar, IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
    Learn More
    Overview

    Datadog is a cloud monitoring solution that is designed to assist administrators, IT teams, and other members of an organization who are charged with keeping a close eye on their networks. Administrators can use Datadog to set real-time alerts and schedule automated report generation. They can deal with issues as they arise and keep up to date with the overall health of their network while still being able to focus on other tasks. Users can also track the historical performance of their networks and ensure that they operate at the highest possible level.

    Datadog Benefits

    Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by deploying Datadog include:

    • Gain an integrated view of the services and programs that IT teams are employing across their networks. Users can view and monitor all of the disparate programs that they have running across their networks with this one solution. They can track these programs across the entirety of the data’s life cycle.
    • Analyze and utilize massive amounts of data in real time. Datadog’s dashboards gather data in real time. Administrators can utilize their network’s data the minute that it becomes relevant to them. Decisions can be made based on the most current information available.
    • Keep your cloud network secured against digital threats. Datadog enables users to create alerts that will notify the minute that threats arise. IT teams and administrators can rapidly address any issue that comes up and prevent any existing problem from growing worse.
    • Easily get it up and running. Users can set up Datadog, configure it, and employ API integrations to connect it to external solutions with ease.

    Datadog Features

    • Customizable and prefabricated monitoring dashboards. Administrators are supplied with two different types of dashboards that they can choose from when they are setting up Datadog. They can customize the dashboards to fit any specialized monitoring need. Additionally, users can choose to use prefabricated dashboards that come with the solution.
    • Disaster recovery feature. Datadog has a built-in feature that enables organizations to continue functioning if some disaster strikes their network. If the network suffers damage, Datadog can restore lost data and infrastructure. Should a digital threat do damage to the network, Datadog ensures that the damage is not irreparable.
    • Vulnerability scanning tool. Users can keep ahead of threats to their networks by employing Datadog’s vulnerability scanning feature. This tool scans the entirety of a user’s network and warns them if a vulnerability is detected. Users can then move to patch these holes in their security before the threat to their network can escalate.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Datadog is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. It can offer organizations many advantages. Two major advantages are the dashboards that users can create and the monitoring capability that it gives system administrators.

    A senior manager in charge of site reliability engineering at Extra Space Storage writes, “The dashboards we created are core indicators of the health of our system, and it is one of the most reliable sources we have turned to, especially as we have seen APM metrics impacted several times lately. We can usually rely on logs to tell us what the apps are doing.”

    Housecall Pro’s senior director of DevOps writes, “We value the monitoring capability since it allows us to be pushed alerts, rather than having to observe graphs continually.

    IBM Security QRadar is a security and analytics platform designed to defend against threats and scale security operations. This is done through integrated visibility, investigation, detection, and response. QRadar empowers security groups with actionable insights into high-priority threats by providing visibility into enterprise security data. Through centralized visibility, security teams and analysts can determine their security stance, which areas pose a potential threat, and which areas are critical. This will help streamline workflows by eliminating the need to pivot between tools.

    IBM Security QRadar is built to address a wide range of security issues and can be easily scaled with minimal customization effort required. As data is ingested, QRadar administers automated, real-time security intelligence to swiftly and precisely discover and prioritize threats. The platform will issue alerts with actionable, rich context into developing threats. Security teams and analysts can then rapidly respond to minimize the attackers' strike. The solution will provide a complete view of activity in both cloud-based and on-premise environments as a large amount of data is ingested throughout the enterprise. Additionally, QRadar’s anomaly detection intelligence enables security teams to identify any user behavior changes that could be indicators of potential threats. 

    IBM QRadar Log Manager

    To better help organizations protect themselves against potential security threats, attacks, and breaches, IBM QRadar Log Manager gathers, analyzes, preserves, and reports on security log events using QRadar Sense Analytics. All operating systems and applications, servers, devices, and applications are converted into searchable and actionable intelligent data. QRadar Log Manager then helps organizations meet compliance reporting and monitoring requirements, which can be further upgraded to QRadar SIEM for a more superior level of threat protection.

    Some of QRadar Log Manager’s key features include:

    • Data processing and capture on any security event
    • Disaster recovery options and high availability 
    • Scalability for large enterprises
    • SoftLayer cloud installation capability
    • Advanced threat protection

    Reviews from Real Users

    IBM Security QRadar is a solution of choice among users because it provides a complete solution for security teams by integrating network analysis, log management, user behavior analytics, threat intelligence, and AI-powered investigations into a single solution. Users particularly like having a single window into their network and its ability to be used for larger enterprises.

    Simon T., a cyber security services operations manager at an aerospace/defense firm, notes, "The most valuable thing about QRadar is that you have a single window into your network, SIEM, network flows, and risk management of your assets. If you use Splunk, for instance, then you still need a full packet capture solution, whereas the full packet capture solution is integrated within QRadar. Its application ecosystem makes it very powerful in terms of doing analysis."

    A management executive at a security firm says, "What we like about QRadar and the models that IBM has, is it can go from a small-to-medium enterprise to a larger organization, and it gives you the same value."

    Sample Customers
    Adobe, Samsung, facebook, HP Cloud Services, Electronic Arts, salesforce, Stanford University, CiTRIX, Chef, zendesk, Hearst Magazines, Spotify, mercardo libre, Slashdot, Ziff Davis, PBS, MLS, The Motley Fool, Politico, Barneby's
    Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm22%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization31%
    Computer Software Company12%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm23%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Security Firm6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business37%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise44%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise39%
    Large Enterprise45%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise50%
    Buyer's Guide
    Datadog vs. IBM Security QRadar
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog vs. IBM Security QRadar and other solutions. Updated: April 2024.
    770,616 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Datadog is ranked 3rd in Log Management with 137 reviews while IBM Security QRadar is ranked 6th in Log Management with 198 reviews. Datadog is rated 8.6, while IBM Security QRadar 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 IBM Security QRadar writes "A highly stable and scalable solution that provides good technical support". Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Elastic Observability, whereas IBM Security QRadar is most compared with Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk Enterprise Security, Wazuh, LogRhythm SIEM and Google Chronicle Suite. See our Datadog vs. IBM Security QRadar report.

    See our list of best Log Management vendors.

    We monitor all Log Management 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.