Datadog Room for Improvement

AF
Senior Software Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

It is very difficult to make the solutions fit perfectly for large organizations, especially in terms of high cardinality objects and multi-tenancy, where the data needs to be rolled up to a summarized level while maintaining its individual data granularity and identifiers. Tagging is imperative. However, the solutions could be improved for these needs in the future.

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BH
Architect at SEI Investments

I have done every training offered (and in a short period of time: two days for 20 courses).

I find the training great. That said, it is set for the LCD (lowest common denominator). Of course, this is very helpful to sell the product, yet, to really utilize the product, you need to get more detailed.

If I did the training as it is written and I cut/paste a bunch of stuff and see the cut/paste work, I didn't really learn anything. Later sessions (I quit using the editor and switched to VI) stopped cutting and pasting, and learned much more.

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Felix Flores - PeerSpot reviewer
Staff Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Once Datadog has gained wide adoption, it can often be overwhelming to both know and understand where to go to find answers to questions. Currently, we use a combination of documentation and COPs to ensure that folks know how to leverage what we have in Datadog properly.

While the guides for Datadog go a long way, a way to customize the user experience from "advanced" to "novice" mode would go a long way.

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Buyer's Guide
Datadog
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Datadog. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Bharath Babu  Kasimsetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at CBRE

Datadog could improve the flexibility with AI and ML concepts. This will allow customers to be more leveraged towards publishing.

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Enrique Bassallo - PeerSpot reviewer
AWS Cloud Architect Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The solution should provide alerts for cloud outages that would allow us to report potential service impacts directly to applications or on the dashboard. Alerts are important because there is a need to determine the impact on your SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs to decide whether to move toward disaster recovery or another environment. 

I would like the ability to share dashboard screenshots via email rather than having to direct others to the dashboard because it sometimes requires permissions. 

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JulianLewis - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer at a educational organization with 5,001-10,000 employees

Datadog needs more local Asia-Pacific support, and if they don't have a SaaS solution in Asia-Pacific, they should offer an on-prem version. I'm told that's not possible. 

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Jaswinder Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - Cloud & DevOps at Publicis Sapient

All solutions have some area to improve, and in Datadog they can improve their overall technology moving forward.

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RB
Senior Cloud Engineer, Vice President of Monitoring at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The real issue with this product is cost control. For example, when logs first came out they didn't have any index cuts. This caused runaway logs and exploding costs. 

It seems that admin cost control granularity is an afterthought. For example, synthetics have been out for over four years, yet there is no way to limit teams from creating tests that fire off every minute. If we could say you can't test more than once every five minutes, that would save us 5X on our bill.

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JamesPhillips - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Raymond James

The product needs to have more enterprise approach to configuration.

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SB
Delivery Manager, DBA Services at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Datadog isn't as mature as some of the established players like Dynatrace or Splunk. It's a new product, so they are constantly releasing new features, and I don't have much to complain about.

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RG
Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I often have issues with the UI in my browser. I tend to have a lot of tabs open, yet have issues with it not responding or not showing data. A couple of times, pasting the URL into an incognito window shows the data that's there.

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GS
Software Engineering Manager at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Datadog is so feature-rich that it is often hard to onboard new folks and tough to decide where to invest time. 

The APM is a perfect example of this. This feature alone has so much (profiling, tracing, span summary, flame graphs). I would love to see more of the insight and automation-focused features, such as the log patterns, where I can spend time more efficiently.

The cost of Datadog at scale can get very expensive very quickly. I would like to see a better usage/cost dashboard with breakdowns like the AWS cost explorer.

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Ramon Snir - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at a tech vendor with 1-10 employees

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. 

Older, more mature products tend to be complete (many features, customization, broad integrations, etc.), while newer products will often be at a "just above minimum viable product" phase for a long time, doing what's intended yet missing valuable customizations and integrations.

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MS
Staff Cloud Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 51-200 employees

The real issue with this product is cost control. For example, when logs first came out, they didn't have any index cuts. This leads to runaway logs and exploding costs. 

It seems that admin cost control granularity is an afterthought. For example, synthetics have been out for over four years, yet there are no ways to limit teams from creating tests that fire off every minute. If we could say you can't test more than once every five minutes that would save us 5X on our bill.

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Deivid Viana - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Architect at Vale

The solution needs to integrate AI tools. 

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AN
Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

At times, it can be hard to generate metrics out of logs. I've seen some of those break over time and have flakey data available. 

Creating a monitor out of the metric and using it in a dashboard to generate our SLIs and SLOs has been hard, especially in cases where the data comes from nested logging facets.

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Jon Schwartz - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at LeafLink

I recently saw the education, and it is amazing. Events like DASH are extremely helpful in understanding the deep set of features. Anything that helps to educate users is a huge win here. 

The menu on the left is pretty dense (and I know it has to be). I never knew about the cmd+k functionality until recently. It would be helpful to offer more tips/cheat sheets to see handy shortcuts like that.

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BW
Software Engineer at Enable Medicine

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). 

I've learned about a ton of other offerings, like APM, NPM, etc., over the course of workshops. Once I try those out, I'm sure I will have additional feedback.

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Rawat Singhsatit - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Consultant Manager at MFEC

Datadog could be improved if it could detect other software in a container or server. Datadog is better than other APM or observability tools, but it focuses mostly on telling the customer what they need to know about the software, database or applications that land on the server. We also need to know the version before setting up an agent with the APM modeling tool.

In some instances, the owner of a particular software changes to another person and this person did not originally transfer the knowledge or data to manage the server. The new person needs to monitor this server and they need to know what software or version of software was installed on this server before they used the APM agent for monitoring. If datadog could provide this insight, it would improve how we use the solution. 

In a future release, we would like to be able to complete a network traffic or network flow analysis to detect the errors or problems on the network.

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FO
SRE at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

My main place of improvement for Datadog would be the documentation. While the tool is robust with many different capabilities, users would greatly benefit from more examples in the documentation. 

The number of current code snippets available in the docs is not enough, and some need to be updated even today. 

One function I would add would be a button to generate a report of the performance of a synthetic test and the performance of each of the steps in the test over time.

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FC
API Developer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Since I have only been in the organization for four months, I only worked with the log, alerts, and monitoring. I do not have so many insights to share about what can be improved.

I am not an expert user, and not even an intermediate user yet. Rather, I am a beginner.

That said when the logs are too big, and Datadog splits them, the JSON format breaks and it is not so useful for us.

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DG
VP, Application support at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The dashboard could be improved. It would be helpful to get a view of specific things that we need to monitor for our application. However, it was a good way to watch specific things and add them together.

The application performance monitoring module had very few functionalities that we needed for the application health check. This needs to have some more features to consolidate the view into one tree.

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RC
Senior Director with 10,001+ employees

Datadog lacks a deeper application-level insight. Their competitors had eclipsed them in offering ET functionality that was important to us. That's why we stopped using it and switched to New Relic.

Datadog's price is also high.

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RA
Senior IT Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

The product could be improved by providing remote control to agents, enabling them to execute automation and collections without requiring another automation tool or integration. 

Also, there is a lot of space for the FinOps discipline. For example, it could potentially provide better and richer information for the teams to check the costs and optimize the product.

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MC
VP at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The correlation between the logs and the metrics needs improvement as most cases, we might use another logging tool (that is cheaper in cost) which then we have to link together. 

They can improve the SSO logging as well. Currently, we are logging in every two to three days by sending the login link explicitly.

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CY
Senior Manager at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

I would love to see more metrics or analytics in IoT devices. 

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CF
ITOPS and SRE Manager at Ticket

The FinOps needs improvement. 

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Nuno Rosa - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Consultant at Infosys

Deploying the agents is still very manual. 

Network monitoring could be better or rolled into this solution so that you do not have to buy a different product.

Customization of the tool itself should be taken into account. At the moment, although what they provide out of the box is good, they don't offer many customization possibilities. I know it's difficult, however, it's something that they would need to look at. When the customer gets some customization, they want customized requirements. We cannot do it. 

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MP
Sr. Manager - DevOps at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

The product needs a better Datadog agent installation.

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James Baird - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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. 

I would like a way to show a continuous indication of what my setup will cost on a daily or weekly basis.

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JK
IT Test Manager at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

I'd like to see more flexibility in the customization and they have a few settings which need to be changed but we are unable to make those changes as users or as the administrator. The tagging to get the different parts of the monitoring interconnected is a bit tricky and takes time to work out. 

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VM
Software Engineering Manager at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

Overall, we really like the quality and relevance of all of the Datadog products that are currently being used. 

The documentation is very well organized and is the go-to place for us to find answers to our questions. 

We would really like to see more from the Service Catalog. It is something that we are interested in. However, some might think it lacks some key features at this time. We will definitely keep our eye out for this and adopt it when all the features are implemented. 

We're really looking forward to all the great things DD will do.

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ER
Senior Software Engineer at a transportation company with 51-200 employees

I found the documentation can sometimes be confusing. I tried configuring APM for some of our Python containers, and I had to cross-reference multiple blog posts and the official documentation to figure out which Datadog-agent to use. If I needed a ddtrace trace, what environment variables I should set, etc. 

Furthermore, to generate my own traces, I wasn't aware that ddtrace adds its own "monkey patching," which led to headaches with respect to configuring the service for RabbitMQ.

A more unified and up-to-date documentation suite would be greatly appreciated.

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VM
Senior Cloud Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We'd like to see better transformers.

Live chat would be the best way to support us. 

Also, the features that we saw getting launched recently were something we expected and we're glad to see them coming.  

Geo-data is also something very critical that we hope to see in the future.

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LuWang - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps Engineer at Screencastify

Definitely, documentation could use improvement. As I navigated and try to find instrumentation and implementation details, I discovered inconsistency among SDKs based on languages. 

There are also places where highlighting can be improved. I once created an issue on GitHub, and it was resolved right away by an engineer. He pointed out that it was actually in the documentation. I looked again and found it was not very obvious. We were stuck on the problem for days.

Auto instrumentation on tracing has not been very easy to find in the documentation. We ended up using OpenTelemetry, yet the conversion between tracing contexts has been difficult.

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RD
Software Engineer at Spring Health

We need more advanced querying against logs. While most issues I have had here can be alleviated by way of sending better-formatted logs, it would be cool to do SQL-type queries against our data.

We need a way to see dashboard metadata. We launched a huge customer, and we saw more people using Datadog than ever across the entire organization, yet had no way to tell.

It would be ideal if we had some way to compare arbitrary date times more easily. We would love to use the Diff Graph command against some hard-coded value, for instance, against some known event.

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TC
Infrastructure engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

The solution can be improved via open communication to the broader audience on what has changed and what has not changed. I sometimes log in and see items changed, either in the UI or a feature enabled. To see it for the first time without proper communication can sometimes come as a shock.

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WZ
Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The storage of logs is a little bit unexpected; most services generate gigabytes of logs, and their size is not excessive. 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.

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AM
Security Engineering Manager at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

One area where I was really looking for improvement was the CSPM product line. I had really wanted to have team-level visibility for findings, since the team managing the resources has much more context and ability to resolve the issue, as the service owner. However, this has been added to the announcement in a recent keynote. 

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Plinio Moreira - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Engineer at Delfia

We have contact with many customers that cover many areas, so we have cases where the infrastructure administration could be improved. In general, cloud users and microservices users like Kubernetes offer a faster improvement in the environment. Our users of the feature logs had a lot of benefits and found cost reductions also.

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RD
Director of Software Engineering at Code Climate

The pricing model hurts and forces us to work around the tool sometimes.

On top of application performance metrics, it would be great to have host performance metrics, suggesting changes to better use a cluster like: "You are over-provisioning this host" or "based on historical data, you will need to scale up in X days."

Adding a module to extract data from Datadog so we can use the data in our own system would be helpful.

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BS
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

I'm sure that this is said all the time, however, the pricing model has led us to restrict the usage of the service. If there were a more cost-effective manner of deploying the tool, we'd be more likely to adopt it more widely. 

Aside from the cost, the nature of the tagging and grouping features within the monitoring dashboards have often caused headaches when creating new dashboards for aggregate services and infrastructure stacks. It would be nice to ensure that this feature is supported long-term and brought with easier accessibility.

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SA
Cloud Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

To be very fair, I haven't had enough experience with Datadog to pick out improvements.

My involvement with Datadog has largely been positive. I love the simplicity and intuitiveness it offers - even for nontechnical folks who just might be starting out with developing technical chops in their domain.

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AL
Associate at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

This service could be less costly. Right now, we only keep 15 days worth of logs since we want to be more economical in terms of cost. It would be nice if I had the option to monitor logs beyond 15 days. For APM traces, we only keep a year worth of traces. The UI can be a little more straightforward as well. I found it to have too many options.

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AB
Director of Cloud Operations at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

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.

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MF
Software Developer at a pharma/biotech company with 51-200 employees

Sometimes it’s difficult to customize certain queries to find specific things, specifically with the logging solution. I’ve used other logging platforms in the past that have extensive and mature query languages. This might not be super friendly to start out with, yet can be very powerful. 

I wish there was more of an emphasis on query languages instead of the UI-based tooling that Datadog provides. Even though it is powerful on its own, the UI-based design lacks the elegance, efficiency, and complexity.

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CS
Product SRE at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

We would like to see some versioning system for the Synthetic Tests so that we could have a backup of our tests since they are time-consuming to make and very easy to damage in a moment of error.

I look forward to seeing the next features that will be released.

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TV
Lead Architect at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

I've found that the documentation is lacking in certain regards. In going through sessions around certain services, the presenter expressed opinions on best practices that are not covered by documented examples. 

In taking these thoughts to the "experts," further research is required both by us and those working the table to come to a solution that meets our needs. If there were more documentation on best practices this may be easier to manage.

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EL
Lead Software Engineer at a retailer with 51-200 employees

As a new customer, the Datadog user interface is a bit daunting. It gets easier once one has had a chance to get acquainted with it, yet at first, it is somewhat overwhelming. Maybe having a "lite" interface with basic features would make it easier to climb the learning curve.

Maybe the feature already exists. However, I'm not sure how to keep dashboard designs and synthetic tests in source control. For example, we may replace a UI feature, and rebuild a test accordingly in a pre-production environment, yet once the code is promoted to production, the updated test would also need to be promoted.

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SM
Engineering Manager at Indeed.com

I would like better navigability across pages. The UI/UX is powerful, yet less intuitive. A lot of times, I somehow navigate across buttons and pages, and I end up forgetting how to get back to a particular view that was more insightful. 

Particularly as Datadog starts offering more platform capabilities like APM, Watchdog, Shift left initiatives like instrumentation, continuous testing, intelligent test runner, and Synthetic and real user monitoring, the UI can become more and more clunky, giving users a very frustrating experience. 

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HL
Sr Platform Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 11-50 employees

Some of the interface is still confusing to use. It has many features, and it takes a lot of effort to figure out what they all mean. Maybe having tooltips or something would be helpful. Also, some of the integrations are better than others.

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Ian Schell - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Site Reliability Architect at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

There is occasional UI slowness and bugs. While the Datadog UI is generally miles above its competitors, there are a few cases where it falls short or has started to slow down over time. They also occasionally make poor UI redesign choices. They should continue focusing on this area to maintain the high standard they started out with.

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JC
Software Engineer at Enable Medicine

The product is quite complex, and there are so many features that I either didn't know about or wasn't sure how to use.

One thing that could be improved is somehow surfacing interesting or relevant products that might be applicable given our infrastructure. 

Additionally, the billing can sometimes be confusing and opaque, especially around not making it obvious what the implications can be if you add different AWS integrations. This has caused some unexpected costs in the past due to engineers not understanding how Datadog pricing works.

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reviewer1479957 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Director of DevOps at Housecall Pro

Their logging solution is expensive for our use case. They do have the capability to rehydrate old or incomplete logs, and it works, but I would rather not have to think about that operation.

Datadog has a lot of documentation, but a lot of that documentation assumes you know how the service works, which can lead to confusion. Positive note is that they do have lots of documentation, it just needs better curation.

Their APM solution still needs some work, but they are actively developing it. I would also like to see more database-specific application monitoring.

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MI
Site Reliability Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

The way data is represented can be limiting. They have added their own little query language that you can use to manipulate things, so you can graph and relate two different metrics together. This is relatively new this year. When I first tried it out a long time ago, you could graph a metric and another metric, and they'd overlay, but you couldn't take the ratio between the two. However, it looks like this is the direction that they're going, and that's a good direction. I think they should continue adding things that way.

I like being able to put the formulas in myself. I don't want the average. I want a rolling average over three minutes, not five minutes. They're getting better at letting the user customize this.

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YS
Works

Integration should have been easier. It is very tough to go to all the services and enable Datadog integration for each AWS service. 

We can add the AWS services and the services on one page and show only the services that are enabled. A similar approach should be for any other integration.

Lately, chat support has a longer waiting time. We would love to get faster chat support. We also need additional support for sending the flare files

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DM
Atlassian Expert at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

The current way accounts are billed could be vastly improved - especially when involving multiple organizations across multiple accounts in combination with reserved commitments. 

Being able to have an automatic materialized report on certain dashboards that could be exported as PDF to be shared with non-Datadog users could help a lot. 

Other than that, we are more than happy with the features we use regularly.

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DK
Senior Director at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

We'd like Datadog to make the log storage cheaper. Right now, it makes our life difficult since logs are stored separately.

We should not have to rely on team members to educate themselves in Datadog features. There should be templates that anyone can select, and they should be able to create dashboards easily. This is really slowing us down. It takes time to to explore the full potential of Datadog.

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AA
Technical Lead at a wholesaler/distributor with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution can be improved in a few areas. 

The parallel editing of the dashboards should not cause users to lose the work of another person. 

Secondly, we would like to see more demos of tools that are in beta version, when they come live. I am sure they will help us a lot.

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MF
Software Developer at a pharma/biotech company with 51-200 employees

Sometimes it’s difficult to customize certain queries to find specific things, specifically with the logging solution. I’ve used other logging platforms in the past that have extensive and mature query languages, which might not be super friendly to start out with, yet they can be very powerful. I wish there was more of an emphasis on that instead of the UI-based tooling that Datadog provides. Even though it is powerful on its own, UI-based design lacks the elegance, efficiency, and complexity that something like that can provide. 

View full review »
reviewer1494894 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager, Site Reliability Engineering at Extra Space Storage

Continued improvement around cost and pricing model is needed. It is pretty complex and takes a fair amount of intimate knowledge to know exactly how turning on a single function is going to impact your bill, especially when you don't see the metrics for a day or two. 

We have recently had a number of issues with stability and delays on logging, monitoring, metric evaluation, and alerts. More often than not in the past month, it seems that we get the banner across the to of our dashboards that some service is impacted. They don't always show up on the incident page, either.

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reviewer1476039 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer / AWS Cloud Engineer / Network Management Specialist at CareFirst

More pre-configured "Monitor Alerts" would be helpful. Datadog's knowledge of its customers and what they are looking for in terms of monitoring and alerting could be taken advantage of with pre-canned alerts. They have started this with "Recommended Monitors".  That feature was very helpful when configuring our Kubernetes alerts. More would be even better. 

Datadog tech support is very good. One area that could be more helpful is actually talking to someone or sharing your screen to help troubleshoot issues that arise. For new cloud engineers just coming into the cloud monitoring field, there is a learning curve. There is a lot to learn and figure out. For example, we still ran into some issues configuring the private link and more videos of how to do things could be of use.

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HT
Project senior at Moka Cloud factory

Datadog is expensive. 

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MG
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The biggest improvement would be around educational content and helping new users get started. I've only been using Datadog for a few months, and at first, it was frankly overwhelming in terms of both the UI and the available capabilities. The workshops today have helped with this, however, more could be done.

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ME
Devops Engineer II at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

The sheer amount of products that are included can be overwhelming. 

The solution requires better overarching UI, which would make things clearer. Even though I generally dislike the AWS UI, it makes the different services very clear, and it also makes where you are at any given point clear. 

The sidebar for all the different services is a bit much. 

I also found the tagging of logging pipelines to be a bit tedious. It would be great if, once marked up, it would automatically be a first-class citizen in Datadog.

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AM
Software Engineer at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

It can be overwhelming for new people as it has a lot of features. The UI could certainly be improved. Having less information with better organization could help newcomers. I haven't seen the documentation, however, a well-organized documentation would invite many varied users.

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RH
SRE at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Datadog could always lower the price! In general, more demos online and maybe more free hands-on tutorials for basic functionality would be good for less technical users. 

I would also prefer more chances to amend the contract more than twice a year. As a smaller but growing company, it can be difficult to adequately predict demand.

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KO
support Eng

Datadog is a great tool, and we value the services they offer. They should continue expanding and integrating with more third-party apps.

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PL
SRE at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

There is always room for improvement when dealing with cloud-based technologies. Mainly, I would say, it's just increasing our offerings to attract various other types of industries and businesses across more fields. 

New features as requested by our existing customers will help make the product better.

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NY
SRE at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Federated views for Datadog dashboards are critical as large companies utilize multiple instances of the product and cannot link the metrics or correlate the metrics together. This stunts the usage of Datadog. Additionally, using an OTel agent would be more acceptable and allow for easier adoption of Datadog across the hundreds of teams here.

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NK
Lead Blockchain and Back-End Developer at Torum Technology

We didn't do a deep analysis on this at this moment to identify the disadvantages.

We have noticed that Session Replays are unavailable on the mobile app. We'd like mobile app integrations. They could have better log reporting. That said, almost everything that we require is there. 

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CC
Senior Site Reliability Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Managing dashboards as IaC is a bit hard to work out at times. I use custom tools to convert JSON dashboards to Terraform resources. Ideally, I'd like for some sort of building tool for this to be built into the app. For example, a templating system that can easily be exported to IaC would be transformative for us. 

There are also some aspects of the API that can be a bit verbose - especially in the area of new features like SLOs - and take some time to understand. That said, overall, they're well-documented enough to be a minor concern for us.

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BK
Senior Engineering Manager,Mobile Wireless Engineering at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

We need more integration functionality, including certain metrics integration. We should be able to monitor devs and need it to build more monitoring tools and offer leadership metrics.

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WF
Cloud Specialyst at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

We need a lot of modules since we collect all data logs from all operating systems. 

The most important module for us is log management. The second is the security module. The third one is the APM.

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TW
Test Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I have talked to vendors that mention that DataDog is drawing attention to an issue. However, you'll still need to take action on your own. The more tools that they can build that allow you to run AWX playbooks, or other similar fixes, would benefit clients greatly.

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SM
Senior Manager, Cyber Digital Transformation at a security firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

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CC
DevOps Engineer at a printing company with 51-200 employees

Our experience has been overwhelmingly positive so far. That said, there is one area that could benefit from some polish. For example, I want to applaud the efforts in making the UI extremely usable and approachable. My suggestion would be to take another look at how the menu structure is put together, however. Even after using the platform mostly every day for months, I still find myself trying to find a service or feature in the menus.

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AS
Production engineer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

We need more visibility into the error tracking dashboard. I only learned about it during a demo at Dash Con. That said, it seems to be a very useful tool.

Additionally, we want to export our dashboards and monitors to source control, and there doesn't seem to be any easy way to do so.

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GH
Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

ECS could be improved by including more tutorials for beginners to reduce the barriers to entry. It would help to ensure understanding and learning in terms of how to use a cloud provider. Besides this, there are not any other areas of improvement needed since the service is very straightforward and there is ample documentation.

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MZ
Software enginneer at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We look forward to the next features from Datadog. We need to learn more about the session reply feature inside of DD.

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RC
Director Of Software Development at Major League Baseball

We would like to see smaller or shorter tutorials and video sessions. Also, the ability to provide a custom formula for monitoring is vital. Perhaps there can be more training materials on this. We often need to detect slow-running queries and slow network responses. We also focus a lot on the abuse of request limits. Having some form of rate limit features or metrics would be useful.  

Profiling could also be useful. Some services are CPU-intensive, and others are IO-intensive. Knowing where the bottleneck is, is crucial. 

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AM
Senior Cyber Security Expert at a security firm with 11-50 employees

While I like the ease of use, when compared with Tenable Nessus they could still improve their usability. They are okay, but there is room to be better.

They could have more integration.

They could be more intuitive as well. For example, the intuitivity of the user interfaces, and how long it takes for users to learn how to use Datadog.

It is not impossible to use, or impossible to do the administration with it but when you put these two next to each other, meaning Nessus and Datadog, Nessus comes out as the winner.

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PA
Co-Founder at Exeo IT

We haven't used the solution too much yet to assess what features it is missing or would improve. The support in Latin American is a point that would mark as a point to improve

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reviewer1480866 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of DevOps at Digital Media Solutions Group

In the past two years, there have been a couple of outages.

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JL
Lead Application Developer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees

The logging could be improved in the future. 

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SB
Cloud Architect at a tech services company

Additional metrics should be included.

Better integration with other solutions is needed.

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CG
Cloud Engineer at a retailer with 51-200 employees

The documentation leaves a lot to be desired for new users. The documentation is way too much text and has no real information just to help get people started. Sometimes it doesn't help to read an entire essay just to get a grasp on how the logs or metrics work.

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EX
Lead Support Engineer at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees

The ability to find what you are looking for when starting out could be improved. It was a bit overwhelming trying to figure out what is the best solution. It led to many prototypes or time spent just perusing documentation. If we were able to select bundles or template use cases, we would hit the ground running quicker.

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JL
Software engineer at a marketing services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Datadog could make their use cases more visible either through their docs or tutorial videos. There are different implementations of certain features that we utilize to customize Datadog functionality and in that way, we sometimes get results that are not conducive to what Datadog thinks their features' use cases are.

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LM
Principal Solutions Architect at a security firm with 51-200 employees

I haven't really noticed anything that they could improve upon. Maybe they could add in some features to go both ways, to maybe make some configuration changes, etc. That's a little bit outside of what Datadog does, though. It's really very full-featured, so I don't really have any complaints.

I haven't really fully looked at the documentation as I know where I need to go and look at things. It could probably be a little bit of a better user experience. There are so many functions there that sometimes navigating your way around is a little bit hard. They have a really nice menu system. However, there's so much there. It's possible that I skipped a guided tour when I started.

It’s not intuitive to everyone. There are a lot of technical features.

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EB
AWS Cloud Architect Consultant at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

One of the improvement opportunities that we have identified in my project concerns how hard it is to manage an organizational structure when you have multiple things in one organization, and you want to provide some kind of isolation between them. At the same time, from the management perspective, you want to see an overall overview of what is happening in your business unit, or as a whole division. This is the kind of limitation we're facing.

I'm not sure what kind of features are in the roadmap right now, but I encourage the development of features for defining your organization, and allowing the visibility of what kind of metrics you can get. Those features would be really useful for us. 

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DJ
Software Engineer at a media company with 51-200 employees
  • It would be nice to be able to graph metrics by excluding certain tags (like you can do in monitors). 
  • 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. 
  • It would be great if usage metrics were automatically created and we could create custom metrics, instead we ended up building some of our own stuff to track and alert on our own usage.
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MW
Principal Software Engineer at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

They need to implement template variables into the message response body. They could be injected in the subsequent calls. However, they fail to be able to use those variables anywhere in the alert body message that is sent out.

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SR
Data Engineer II at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

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. 

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BS
Sr. Director of Software Engineering at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would like to see retention options greater than 30-days for session replay. I'd also like to see forwarding options for retention to custom solutions, and a greater ability to event and export data from the tooling overall to BI/DW solutions for reporting across the long term and to see trends as needed.

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KW
Senior Software Engineer at Grata

Sometimes, it takes a long time to load the dashboard if we have many charts.

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AP
Technology Competency and Solution Head at LearningMate

The error traceability is an area that can be improved. This is something that helps us to pinpoint the area where a problem is occurring. It is a function stack, and it should be showing us how each function is defined.

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reviewer1486134 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Engineer at DATACAMP, INC

The incident management beta looks promising, but it is still missing the ability to automatically create incidents based on certain alerts.

SLOs are also a great way to visualize how you are doing with regard to the level of service that you are providing but it missing crucial components like:

  • The ability to visualize the remaining error budget and how it evolved during the month. An error budget burndown graph would be helpful.
  • The ability to display a different level of alert on an SLO based on how fast it is consuming the error budget. This is the slow burn versus fast burn.
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reviewer1477686 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at DigitalOnUs

Please add PHP profiling; you already have it for other popular programming languages such as Python and Java, which is great because we have a little bit of those, but our main app is powered by PHP and we don't have profiling for this yet. I guess it's only a matter of time for this to be added, so in the meanwhile, you can consider this review as a vote for the PHP profiling support.

The pricing model could be simplified as it feels a bit outdated, especially when you look at the billing model of compute instances vs the containers instances.

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PK
Product Manager, Delivery Engineering at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Custom-level metrics could be improved.

Billing should be more transparent.

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BA
Performance Testing Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The setup was a bit complex. 

As Datadog is a bit on the expensive side, I would recommend it for simple, uncomplicated, solutions.

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reviewer1493811 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Architect - SaaS Ops at CommVault

We need the ability to create a service dependency map like Splunk ITSI. We have to build this in PagerDuty and it's not the best user experience. The ability to create custom inventory objects based on logs ingested would be a value add. It would be better if Datadog makes this a simple click and enable.

It would be helpful to have the ability to upgrade agents via the Datadog portal. Once agents are connected to the Datadog portal, we should be able to upgrade them quickly.

Security monitoring for Azure and Operating System (Windows and Linux) are features that need to be addressed.

Dashboards for Azure Active Directory metrics and events should be improved.

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BB
Software Engineer at Lovepop

Some of their newer solutions are interesting, like their logging, but they are not fleshed out. They could use more metrics or synthetics, which would be really helpful.

I would love to see support for front-end and mobile applications. Right now, it is mostly all back-end stuff. Being able to do some integration with our front-end products would be awesome.

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it_user147573 - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO with 51-200 employees

More granular control over dashboard sharing. Timeboard sharing.


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JL
Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

There is not much that needs to be improved. 

The UI is super user-friendly. The deployment process is easy. We enjoy using the integrations with Slack and PagerDuty. 

Customer support is awesome from our experience. There is a lot of documentation for us to be able to use if we need to. 

I'm not sure if Datadog can monitor K8s deployments in real-time. For instance, being able to see a deployment step by step visually. This would be helpful if there were any incidents during the deployment. 

In general, Datadog is a great solution.

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JL
Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Datadog has a lot of features kind of cramped into one dashboard. It's quite hard to get around what feature does exactly what. There was a steep learning curve, trying to navigate through menus.

The menu navigation could improve. If there was a more straightforward way of adding new functions or features to where each menu is placed that would be an improvement.

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LA
Associate Founder at KerBBo Consulting

In terms of what could be improved, Datadog does not have the feature where you can monitor external websites or check the SSL secure for websites.

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EB
manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

Our main challenge is implementing the solutions in our Kubernetes cluster, separated just as logs to the specific namespace since the volume of logs is tremendous.

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AG
Site Reliability Engineer at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees

Graph filters for logs need to be set manually which works well for JSON but not for unstructured logs. 

Making structured logs for high-performance applications is over our heads so we had to dump some technical streams for our logs. 

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PG
Software Engineer at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Delta traces on the Golang profiler are extremely expensive concerning memory utilization. In a Kubernetes environment where we would like to set per-pod memory allocations as low as possible, the overhead of that profiler feature is prohibitive. In one case, our pods (which were provisioned to target 250 MB and max at 500 MB memory) got stuck in a crash loop due to out-of-memory, which was caused entirely by the delta profiles feature of the profiler.

Multistep Datadog synthetics lack the feature of basic arithmetic. For our use case, performing basic arithmetic on the output of previous steps to produce input for subsequent steps would be extremely useful.

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NP
Sales Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Datadog could have a better business analysis module. 

Other vendors have specific business collections and analyses. With Datadog, I don't see much of it. It's possible to do this with custom metrics, dashboards, etc. However, none of those are business-focused - and that is what is lacking in Datadog.

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PN
Head of Digital & Cognitive Services at a tech company with 11-50 employees

It can have an artificial intelligence component. Even though I can seamlessly look at end-to-end security, it would be better to have alerts and notifications powered by an AI engine. I am not sure if they have an AI component. We have not reached out to them or looked at it, but this is something that I keep on talking about within our company in terms of features. Such a feature would be good to have, and it would further optimize my Security Ops team's abilities.

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DD
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The only thing that they were missing that has throw us from the beginning (they are still missing it) is consistency in the APIs. There are a couple of guys on the automation side who complain rightfully over how hard it is because every new feature which comes out has a new way of interfacing with the API. This was our big, red flag in the beginning, but given the price and other features, it wasn't enough for us to discount. We said "That we would live with this one red flag", but it is still a red flag.

Stability of the product has been a concern for us outside of the primary monitoring agents.

It does not have the best interface.

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SM
Sr. Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

We need more integration with security tools like Drata.

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SH
Senior Cloud Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

I believe there is room for improvement with this solution. It wasn't easy for me to get a quick understanding of what this tool offers us as opposed to the added tools of AWS. By that, I mean in regards to finding a better way to apply some filters or to create some alarms. I don't get more advanced features in comparison to AWS but at least I get a centralized way of doing things, which can be done on the AWS side as well. It's more complicated because you have to configure some other services to stream their logs from multi accounts to one account. It could be more user friendly and include advanced examples in the documentation showing some use cases or customer case studies, so you can get a clear idea that this functionality provides something extra. 

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AS
DevOps Engineer at Spark New Zealand

The product could do better with its notifications. 

I want more technical support than conferences because technical support helps with setting up the product much easier.

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IA
Cloud Operations Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Alerting timing should be improved to be more fine-tuned and exact. The current problem is that monitoring is integrated with the Statuspage and the SLA.

Also, browser support for browsers other than Chrome should be added. Browser test recording is another problem, as it does not always work in normal mode. One needs to use incognito mode or a pop-up.

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ER
Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

The ease of implementation needs improvement. I did not personally experience the initial deployment of Datadog in our environment, however, after some conference workshops, some of the pain points with deployment and turning on certain settings or features were revealed. I would not know how to deal with these issues (or sometimes where to begin) if I were starting from scratch.

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GC
Security Analyst at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

I'm still exploring the trial version, and it is fine. One thing that I haven't been able to figure out is how to retrieve a report. This is something that could be improved. I probably need to navigate to a place to access the reports. 

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BB
Project Director at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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 usage. For example, if there is a 20% more increase from one week to another, the customer should get an alert.

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FD
Production Engineering at a construction company with 51-200 employees

I would like the tooling to have better integration in Slack, specifically sending out reminders to the relevant people to take breaks, do a retrospective, and specify with emojis which messages to log.

Learning about the tooling could also be improved. It is a bit clunky to use, especially in an incident. It could definitely be more streamlined.

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KN
Senior Software Engineer at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

The Log Explorer could be better. I don't think it has log manipulation as Splunk does.

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JC
System Ninja at a philanthropy with 51-200 employees

We want to reduce having to go to different screens to obtain all the information. However, they are moving in the right direction from what we have noticed.

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JC
Sr.Tech.Analyst Monitoreo at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

It could use some additional features when working with metrics like Grafana or like New Relic has. Datadog does not use library technologies like Dynatrace does. Datadog has machine learning too, but it does not have this option in all layers of monitoring like infrastructure service process in applications. 

View full review »
UD
Director at a media company with 11-50 employees

They could look into improving the integration.

I'd like to see better pricing and more integration in the next release.

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DT
Director of Engineering at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

There are things about it that we would like to be fixed, such as it is taking averages of average. This results in data that we don't expect, but overall we are happy with it.

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AA
Principal Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

I would like testing for data in the future. That would be really nice.

Also, I would like some additional enhancement in the visuals.

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VG
Senior Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

The documentation could be improved regarding setting up the agent properly and debugging.

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it_user147570 - PeerSpot reviewer
Programmer with 51-200 employees
The performance, especially when were drilling into metrics we've been running for a year and a half. When you're launching old data it can get slow. View full review »
YS
Software Developer at AhnLab, Inc.

The on-premise version is very difficult to upgrade.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
Datadog
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Datadog. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.