Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Datadog vs PagerDuty: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Datadog and PagerDuty. Both tools are widely used in the field of IT operations and incident management. While they have some similarities, there are several important distinctions that set them apart. Let's explore these differences in detail below.
Monitoring vs Incident Management: The core focus of Datadog is monitoring, providing teams with comprehensive visibility into their infrastructure, applications, and logs. It offers real-time metrics, customizable dashboards, and alerts for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting. On the other hand, PagerDuty primarily focuses on incident management, helping teams to orchestrate and respond to incidents effectively. It provides on-call schedules, escalation policies, and alerting mechanisms to ensure timely incident resolution.
Feature Set: Datadog offers a wide range of features, including infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), log management, network monitoring, and more. It provides extensive integrations with various third-party tools, allowing users to aggregate data from multiple sources. PagerDuty, in contrast, has a more focused feature set centered around incident management. It offers robust alerting capabilities, incident response automation, and powerful on-call management features.
Scope of Use: Datadog is commonly used by DevOps and infrastructure teams to monitor and optimize the performance of their systems. It caters to a broader range of users, including developers, IT operations, and business stakeholders. On the other hand, PagerDuty is typically used by IT operations and DevOps teams for incident management and ensuring service availability. It is primarily focused on supporting incident response workflows.
Integration Ecosystem: Datadog has a strong integration ecosystem, allowing users to collect data from various sources such as cloud providers, databases, containers, and more. It provides out-of-the-box integrations for popular technologies and services, enabling seamless data aggregation. PagerDuty also offers integrations but primarily focuses on integrations with monitoring tools, ticketing systems, and communication platforms to facilitate incident management workflows.
User Interface and Experience: Datadog offers a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface, with customizable dashboards and data visualizations. It provides a comprehensive view of the infrastructure and applications, enabling users to drill down into specific metrics and logs. PagerDuty, while also user-friendly, emphasizes a streamlined incident response experience. It provides a centralized incident dashboard and powerful collaboration features to facilitate quick and effective incident resolution.
Pricing Model: Datadog operates on a subscription-based pricing model, where users pay based on the number of infrastructure hosts and services being monitored. It offers tiered pricing plans with different levels of features and support. On the other hand, PagerDuty follows a user-based pricing model, where costs are based on the number of users accessing the platform and the level of functionality required.
In summary, Datadog and PagerDuty are distinct tools with different focuses. Datadog is primarily a monitoring tool that provides comprehensive visibility into infrastructure and applications, while PagerDuty is an incident management tool focused on orchestrating and managing incident response workflows. The feature sets, scope of use, integration ecosystems, user interfaces, and pricing models differ between the two tools. Each tool brings unique strengths and capabilities to the table, catering to different needs in the IT operations and incident management domains.
Hey there! We are looking at Datadog, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and New Relic as options for our web application monitoring.
Current Environment: .NET Core Web app hosted on Microsoft IIS
Future Environment: Web app will be hosted on Microsoft Azure
Tech Stacks: IIS, RabbitMQ, Redis, Microsoft SQL Server
Requirement: Infra Monitoring, APM, Real - User Monitoring (User activity monitoring i.e., time spent on a page, most active page, etc.), Service Tracing, Root Cause Analysis, and Centralized Log Management.
Please advise on the above. Thanks!
We are looking for a centralised monitoring solution for our application deployed on Amazon EKS. We would like to monitor using metrics from Kubernetes, AWS services (NeptuneDB, AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon EBS, Amazon S3, etc) and application microservice's custom metrics.
We are expected to use around 80 microservices (not replicas). I think a total of 200-250 microservices will be there in the system with 10-12 slave nodes.
We tried Prometheus but it looks like maintenance is a big issue. We need to manage scaling, maintaining the storage, and dealing with multiple exporters and Grafana. I felt this itself needs few dedicated resources (at least 2-3 people) to manage. Not sure if I am thinking in the correct direction. Please confirm.
You mentioned Datadog and Sysdig charges per host. Does it charge per slave node?
Can't say anything to Sysdig. I clearly prefer Datadog as
- they provide plenty of easy to "switch-on" plugins for various technologies (incl. most of AWS)
- easy to code (python) agent plugins / api for own metrics
- brillant dashboarding / alarms with many customization options
- pricing is OK, there are cheaper options for specific use cases but if you want superior dashboarding / alarms I haven't seen a good competitor (despite your own Prometheus / Grafana / Kibana dog food)
IMHO NewRelic is "promising since years" ;) good ideas but bad integration between their products. Their Dashboard query language is really nice but lacks critical functions like multiple data sets or advanced calculations. Needless to say you get all of that with Datadog.
Need help setting up a monitoring / logging / alarm infrastructure? Send me a message!
Hi Medeti,
you are right. Building based on your stack something with open source is heavy lifting. A lot of people I know start with such a set-up, but quickly run into frustration as they need to dedicated their best people to build a monitoring which is doing the job in a professional way.
As you are microservice focussed and are looking for 'low implementation and maintenance effort', you might want to have a look at INSTANA, which was built with modern tool stacks in mind. https://www.instana.com/apm-for-microservices/
We have a public sand-box available if you just want to have a look at the product once and of course also a free-trial: https://www.instana.com/getting-started-with-apm/
Let me know if you need anything on top.
I have hands on production experience both with New Relic and Datadog. I personally prefer Datadog over NewRelic because of the UI, the Documentation and the overall user/developer experience.
NewRelic however, can do basically the same things as Datadog can, and some of the features like alerting have been present in NewRelic for longer than in Datadog. The cool thing about NewRelic is their last-summer-updated pricing: you no longer pay per host but after data you send towards New Relic. This can be a huge cost saver depending on your particular setup
I'd go for Datadog, but given you have lots of containers I would also make a cost calculation. If the price difference is significant and there's a budget constraint NewRelic might be the better choice.
I'm currently on PagerDuty, but I'm about to add enough users to go out of the starter tier, which will dramatically increase my license cost. PagerDuty is, in my experience, quite clunky, and I'm looking for alternatives. Squadcast is one I've found, and another is xMatters. Between the three, I'm currently leaning towards xMatters, but I'd like to know what people suggest.
Disclosure I work at Splunk and VictorOps is a Splunk product. But I would suggest in addition to trying the others adding VO to your list. It's important to note that some of the tools are designed as Incident Response tools, others started as mass notification tools. For on-call stick to those designed for incident response.
I would say to use Squadcast, the configuration is easy, provides a lot of features such as war room, RCA tracking postmortem, RBAC and they are quick to add features on request as well, recently I asked for custom on call reminders and I am sure they will add it really soon.
I haven't heard much about Datadog until about a year ago. Ironically, the NewRelic sales person who I had a series of trainings with was trash talking about Datadog a lot. That drew my attention to Datadog and I gave it a try at another client project where we needed log handling, dashboards and alerting.
In 2019, Datadog was already offering log management and from that perspective, it was ahead of NewRelic. Other than that, from my perspective, the two tools are offering a very-very similar set of tools. Therefore I wouldn't say there's a significant difference between the two, the decision is likely a matter of taste. The pricing is also very similar.
The reasons why we chose Datadog over NewRelic were:
- The presence of log handling feature (since then, logging is GA at NewRelic as well since falls 2019).
- The setup was easier even though I already had experience with NewRelic, including participation in NewRelic trainings.
- The UI of Datadog is more compact and my experience is smoother.
- The NewRelic UI is very fragmented and New Relic One is just increasing this experience for me.
- The log feature of Datadog is very well designed, I find very useful the tagging logs with services. The log filtering is also very awesome.
Bottom line is that both tools are great and it makes sense to discover both and making the decision based on your use case. In our case, Datadog was the clear winner due to its UI, ease of setup and the awesome logging and alerting features.
I chose Datadog APM because the much better APM insights it provides (flamegraph, percentiles by default).
The drawbacks of this decision are we had to move our production monitoring to TimescaleDB + Telegraf instead of NR Insight
NewRelic is definitely easier when starting out. Agent is only a lib and doesn't require a daemon
Pros of Datadog
- Monitoring for many apps (databases, web servers, etc)140
- Easy setup107
- Powerful ui87
- Powerful integrations84
- Great value70
- Great visualization54
- Events + metrics = clarity46
- Notifications41
- Custom metrics41
- Flexibility39
- Free & paid plans19
- Great customer support16
- Makes my life easier15
- Adapts automatically as i scale up10
- Easy setup and plugins9
- Super easy and powerful8
- In-context collaboration7
- AWS support7
- Rich in features6
- Docker support5
- Cute logo4
- Simple, powerful, great for infra4
- Monitor almost everything4
- Full visibility of applications4
- Easy to Analyze4
- Cost4
- Source control and bug tracking4
- Best than others4
- Automation tools4
- Best in the field3
- Expensive3
- Good for Startups3
- Free setup3
- APM2
Pros of PagerDuty
- Just works55
- Easy configuration23
- Awesome alerting hub14
- Fantastic Alert aggregation and on call management11
- User-customizable alerting modes9
- Awesome tool for alerting and monitoring. Love it4
- Most reliable out of the three and it isn't even close3
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Datadog
- Expensive20
- No errors exception tracking4
- External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging2
- Complicated1
Cons of PagerDuty
- Expensive7
- Ugly UI3