Datadog vs Sematext Synthetics comparison

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.”

Sematext Synthetics provides the ability to actively monitor APIs, Web URLs, websites, and user journeys/click flows from multiple locations around the globe. Synthetic monitoring helps you ensure the availability and performance of your APIs and websites. Synthetics will help you identify downtime and performance issues by simulating user requests and interactions with your web page.

No agent installation is required and there is no need to change your application code.

Sematext Synthetic Benefits

• Fix performance issues before they affect your end users
  Synthetic monitoring allows you to simulate user interactions at different locations worldwide. Synthetic performance monitoring monitors all your APIs, web applications, and mobile apps, no matter how many users they are. With Sematext, you can customize Dashboards and Alerts to monitor critical infrastructure aspects and trigger them when they malfunction. This will help you spot problems before they arise.
  

• Benchmark your website
  Synthetic monitoring solutions let you look at your APIs from different places during the day. Then you can use this data as a baseline for benchmarking since it helps you figure out what needs to be improved, and lets you compare your service to the competition.
  
• Test your scaling capabilities
  A website and application are built to respond quickly to users, but your server needs to be ready when traffic spikes unexpectedly. You can run artificial tests to determine how your server will behave under load with synthetic performance monitoring. Once you have this data, you can decide what steps to take to scale gracefully.
  
  
• Test new product features before launching
  If you're launching new features, synthetic monitoring lets you run a full test suite before releasing them during peak hours, which is a great tool to have. You'll be able to see how the application reacts under load and whether any of the recent changes will impact a 3rd party API you might use.
  
  
• Monitor third-party APIs and critical business processes
  If you don't use any third-party tools in your business, you run into a number of problems related to their availability. You need to keep an eye on them and get an alert the second things start to slow down. Monitoring API metrics is not enough to ensure your users get the best experience possible. Make sure your application works as expected, including logging in, searching, and checkout.
  
  
• Ensure SLA compliance
  Whatever side of the SLA you are on – the key is to make sure everyone in the contract adheres to the contract. To understand the performance limitations of your application and set realistic expectations, you should use synthetic monitoring tools if you're a service provider. Customers want to know that the vendor can fulfill his promises.
  
  
• Reduce MTTR
  With synthetic monitoring software like Sematext Synthetics, you can lower your MTTR by sending out alerts before the issue becomes a problem. In addition to being notified sooner, you'll also learn what's causing the problem and how to fix it.

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Just some of the things you can do with Sematext Synthetics

• Monitor & track the availability & performance of APIs
• Monitor SSL certificate expiration time
• Monitor websites and track various web performance metrics like page load time, paint metrics, etc.
• Monitor website uptime
• Monitor individual resource performance in a website by domain, type, and response code
• Create public status page showing the availability of your selected web services and share it with your customers
• Identify slow resources
• Monitor third-party resources performance
• Investigate slow pages & identify bottlenecks using a waterfall chart
• Create user journeys with custom assertions based on the content of the webpage
• Collect and track custom metrics from your sites
• Benchmark against competitors
• Create custom dashboards and alerts based on gathered performance metrics
• Debug downtime with end-to-end visibility of application performance
• Get alerted when things fail via multiple alert channels like email, Slack, Pagerduty, webhooks, etc.
• Monitor websites behind firewalls and on private networks with Private Locations
• Check out the full product update.

At Sematext, we’ve also had the need to monitor application availability. We use Synthetics actively to monitor our own applications and it has helped us uncover issues with our APIs on multiple occasions.

Where to go from here?

Sign up for a free trial and try it for yourself. Pricing starts at $2 per month for HTTP monitors and $7 per month for browser monitors. We have pay-as-you-go pricing if your usage changes or fixed plans if you can estimate your usage.