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."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."
"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."
"I like the transcript download feature. And with UI scripting, it's helpful that Apica handles a lot of the backend work automatically. I don't have to tag everything manually, though I can tag elements later if needed. It's really good at recording the steps."
"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."
"It uses a basic scripting language, which is easy to learn and customize as needed. Compared to LoadRunner, I found writing and customizing code much easier in Apica."
"It is easy to set up and configure."
"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."
"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."
"It is great that creating an incident is possible from Slack while having all the relevant data in Datadog."
"We've been able to glean from the monitors what servers are down, and can alert the team in Slack."
"Having a wealth of information has helped us investigate outages, and having historical data helps us tune our system."
"The solution has helped out organization gain improved visibility."
"Going from viewing a metric to creating a monitor alerting on a metric is very easy."
"The solution is useful for monitoring logs."
"The ease of correcting these dashboards and widgets when needed is amazing."
"They have a very good foundation in capturing metrics, logs, and traces. It's a very nice tool for that and it allows you to apply these monitoring tools in almost any technology."
"When it comes to the way the internal agent is installed, because you can install an application on a server, I would love to see the application Docker-ized. If you could install internal agents using Docker or using containers, it would be easier for us to manage them and spin up internal agents."
"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."
"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."
"The customer service and support were a little slow to respond. The browser sometimes checks alerts on unknown issues like latency from Apica's side."
"The initial screen on their dashboard could have a bit more data, but this is a small thing. It could have more data, so we do not need to drill down to a screen behind that initial information. I would like them to get a little better on the user interfaces that we need to go into."
"We have been focused on reducing polling times for synthetic checks. We have gone from 10 minutes down to five minutes for a pretty broad swath, but there is some appetite to reduce that further, which could be an improvement."
"Apica was a relatively new tool when I started using it. Although Apica had good documentation, it still felt less developed or advanced than a tool like LoadRunner."
"The reporting part that we use for our executives needs a bit more customization capabilities. Right now, you can use only the three main templates for reporting. We would like to be able to customize them."
"Additional metrics should be included."
"The current way accounts are billed could be vastly improved - especially when involving multiple organizations across multiple accounts in combination with reserved commitments."
"The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages."
"The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade."
"Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs."
"Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing."
"It lacks consistency in the APIs."
"This service could be less costly."
Earn 20 points
Apica is ranked 55th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 4 reviews while Datadog is ranked 1st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 137 reviews. Apica is rated 8.4, 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 AppDynamics. 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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