We performed a comparison between AppDynamics vs Datadog based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: AppDynamics has an edge in this comparison because it received higher marks in the ease of deployment, pricing, and ROI categories.
"We have been able to monitor our applications more accurately."
"We set up alerts recently so we can fix any issues more quickly in production."
"We previously had an operations team continuously monitoring applications. Now, they just have set things up and our developers can monitor, view, and act on them, accordingly."
"Despite dozens of deployments across hundreds of applications- we have yet to see a case where AD is negatively impacting application execution or functionality."
"The best features of AppDynamics would be the code application monitoring capabilities."
"Before we moved the code to AppDynamics, we had to compare the agile process and also had to make sure that they're following the standards."
"I think the performance and interface are the most important features."
"AppDynamics provides us with detailed information about the performance of the underlying infrastructure, including servers, databases, and external services."
"Its integration is most valuable because you can integrate it with various service providers such as AWS, .Net, etc."
"Thanks to the logs, we manage to make better reports through Jira and also to trace the request with more facility than we would be able to do otherwise."
"We can handle debugging and find out why things are breaking in our applications."
"Dashboards and their versatility are among the most valuable features."
"The ease with which we can filter, use metrics, and give accounts to customers, then let the customer filter, set up metrics, and alerts. This has been a big win for us."
"For us to have visibility into our app stack and the hardware we run has been highly beneficial."
"Profiling has been made easier."
"I have found the logging and tracing features the most valuable."
"The GUI can be overwhelming at first to a novice Dev or Ops support person, and the possible root causes of an issue do not bubble up to the first screen you see."
"Rolling out version upgrades is a difficult job at times."
"The agent deployment could be simplified by, for example, adding a GUI."
"Needs more integration with applications suites, like Oracle Enterprise Server or BMC Remedy."
"The dashboard can be better. Also, the automated reports could be improved."
"The integration part in AppDynamics with other systems is an area with a little difficulty, especially when it comes to the configuration area. The integration of AppDynamics with other products takes a lot of time."
"The UI could use a little help."
"AppDynamics is a solution that requires extra learning and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, automated reports would helpful similar to have they have in Google Analytics."
"One thing we have run into is that it is so easy to add monitoring that we turn on things without really understanding the costs."
"The Log Explorer could be better. I don't think it has log manipulation as Splunk does."
"Since the Datadog platform has so many separate features, solving so many use cases, there are often inconsistencies in feature availability and interoperability between products."
"Ingesting data from various sources to monitor the log metrics of the system can always improve so that, if something goes wrong, the right teams are alerted."
"Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs."
"The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming."
"It lacks consistency in the APIs."
"We primarily use the log management functionality, and the only feedback I have there is better fuzzy text searching in logs (the kind that Kibana has)."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 155 reviews while Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while Datadog is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Datadog writes "Very good RUM, synthetics, and infrastructure host maps". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Splunk Enterprise Security, New Relic and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, whereas Datadog is most compared with Dynatrace, Azure Monitor, New Relic, AWS X-Ray and Splunk Enterprise Security. See our AppDynamics vs. Datadog report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors and best Container Monitoring 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.
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 monitoring. We maintain critical processing on our mainframe so there was a desire to include this in our transaction trace. Due to a highly mature ELK implementation, we are not trying to incorporate log analytics into solution buy may consider in the future. We had AppD, Dynatrace, New Relic, and CA Wily all in house at the time of our evaluation. We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing. Between Dynatrace and New Relic, Dynatrace won based on the automation, integrated AI, support for "old" techs, and confidence we could eliminate multiple APM and infra monitoring tools.
I would not include products like BigPanda, MoogSoft, in this analysis. They are not monitoring solutions but event correlation solutions. You will need additional monitoring products to capture data and feed them. Having said that if you cannot consolidate tools you will likely need to purchase an event solution to make sense of all the alarms. We did evaluate these products but with Dynatrace AI did not feel the business value was there for the investment.
Here's a quick pro/con list on Dynatrace & New Relic from our analysis.
New Relic Pros: Insights is an awesome product and capability. Lots of capabilities and plugins to extend data collection. The APM dashboard is aesthetically pleasing and intuitive. Good training and documentation are available to support the product.
New Relic Cons: Requires lots of manual configurations to implement and support. Insights product requires an investment of time to achieve value. Licensing is a nightmare as there is virtually no transparency in what you are being charged for. Lack of solution to consolidate alerts across implementation other than significant investment in insights to manually achieve this.
Dynatrace Pros: Very simple to implement and maintain with out of the box automation which supports modern (cloud/Kubernetes) and "old" (mainframe). In-app chat is helpful. High integration of infra and APM data for full-stack observability and engineering. Topology and trace discovery is more reliable than other products or our CMDB. Synthetics are easy to set up for any user. AI-assisted problem analysis on the trace discovery streamlines troubleshooting. AI includes "events" in an analysis like VMotion, deployment events. Have not done yet but looking to leverage monitoring as code for a fully integrated and automated delivery pipeline. See keptn.sh open source project.
Dynatrace Cons: User SQL lacks some functions of NRQL for user analysis. Host, process, and service data is not available to query within the product. Alarm processing lacks some granular controls. The Plug-in library is less robust.
Good luck with your decision!
We are currently going through a paper-based analysis to select an Enterprise APM solution.
Our Contenders are
1. Dynatrace
2. Cisco(AppDynamics)
3. Broadcom DX-APM
Shortlisted based on existing relationships with other products and services they provide.
We discounted New Relic- despite their growing capability - as they are yet to enter the enterprise APM solution scene.
With regards to your response "We eliminated Datadog due to a lack of real user monitoring and AppD based on experience and licensing .." :
Will you be willing to expand on Appd - what was your experience and issues w.r.t licensing. These could help us with our evaluation. Much appreciated. Regards Adrian
Could you please share your requirements ? There are a lot tools can be added to the list. I spent almost 6 months to test and check many tools then I select eG enterprise.
Thanks