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.
"AppDynamics provides us with detailed information about the performance of the underlying infrastructure, including servers, databases, and external services."
"Transition tracing is the most valuable is pretty easy and useful, but the user experience piece is also good."
"Despite dozens of deployments across hundreds of applications- we have yet to see a case where AD is negatively impacting application execution or functionality."
"I think the performance and interface are the most important features."
"In AppDynamics, everywhere I go, there's some sort of grouping and aggregation function, or there's some sort of timeline that lets me zero in more quickly on the traces that I need. They go to more pains to aggregate and bubble the important ones to the top. That removes a lot of manual work."
"Technical support is helpful."
"The initial setup is simple."
"In 2014 and 2015, AppDynamics was one of the best products on the market."
"The most valuable features have been: Sharable dashboards, TimeBoards, dogstatsd API, Slack Integration, Event logging API. CloudTrail Events, Tags, alerts, and anomaly detection. EBS Volume Snapshot Age, which they added upon request."
"The most valuable feature of Datadog is its logs."
"The application performance monitoring is pretty good."
"Datadog has helped us a ton by allowing us to set up a multitude of easily configurable alarms across our tech stack and infrastructure."
"We rely heavily on the API crawlers that Datadog uses for cloud integrations. These allow us to pick up and leverage the tags teams have already deployed without having also to make them add them at the agent level."
"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."
"The dashboards and the performance of the software have been great."
"The ease of correcting these dashboards and widgets when needed is amazing."
"More native support for other hardware is needed because having to install various extensions and perform extra setup for different devices is really challenging, and not as easy or straightforward as it is in other products."
"The worst part is that the AppDynamics SaaS Environment has a lot of downtimes, and AppDynamics, despite our efforts, does not give us any feedback on these downtimes/incidents."
"We have had downtime, which has been the result of config, application, or cord issues."
"The Log Analytics feature is a bit complicated."
"I’d like to see better out-of-the-box visual reporting so that we can roll this up to management."
"The agent deployment could be simplified by, for example, adding a GUI."
"The dashboard can be better. Also, the automated reports could be improved."
"Their agents sometimes claim to be very lightweight, especially with databases, but they are very heavy. They can take up more compute than the actual work that we need to do."
"Sometimes it’s difficult to customize certain queries to find specific things, specifically with the logging solution."
"Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server."
"When it comes to storing the logs with Datadog, I'm not sure why it costs so much to store gigabytes or terabytes of information when it's a fraction of the cost to do so myself."
"Datadog could make their use cases more visible either through their docs or tutorial videos."
"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."
"To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements."
"Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions."
"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."
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 153 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 Elastic Observability. See our AppDynamics vs. Datadog report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
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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