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Datadog VS Amazon CloudWatch

Compare Datadog VS Amazon CloudWatch and see what are their differences

Datadog logo Datadog

See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Amazon CloudWatch logo Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS.
  • Datadog Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-05

Datadog is a monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-scale application infrastructure. Combining metrics from servers, databases, and applications, Datadog delivers sophisticated, actionable alerts, and provides real-time visibility of your entire infrastructure. Datadog includes 100+ vendor-supported, prebuilt integrations and monitors hundreds of thousands of hosts.

  • Amazon CloudWatch Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-26

Datadog features and specs

  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Datadog offers a wide range of monitoring capabilities including infrastructure, application performance, log management, and user experience monitoring. This provides a unified view across the entire tech stack.
  • Integration Ecosystem
    With over 400 integrations available, Datadog can easily connect with virtually any service, application, and technology stack, making it highly versatile.
  • Scalability
    Datadog is designed to scale from small startups to large enterprises, providing functionalities that cater to varied sizes and complexities of operations.
  • Real-Time Data
    The platform provides real-time data and analytics, which is crucial for diagnosing and troubleshooting issues as they arise.
  • Alerting and Notifications
    Advanced alerting and notification features allow users to set up custom alerts based on metrics, enabling proactive problem resolution.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    The user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate, even for those who are not particularly technical, making it accessible to a broader range of users.
  • Security Features
    Datadog includes various security features such as compliance tracking, threat detection, and anomaly detection, enhancing overall security posture.

Possible disadvantages of Datadog

  • Cost
    Datadog can become quite expensive, especially as the volume of monitored data and the number of integrations increases. This can be a limiting factor for smaller businesses.
  • Complexity
    With its extensive feature set, Datadog can be overwhelming for new users, requiring a steep learning curve to master all functionalities.
  • Data Retention
    The default data retention period is often shorter than what some organizations require, leading to additional costs for longer retention.
  • Performance Overhead
    The extensive data collection and monitoring capabilities can add performance overhead to the monitored systems, potentially impacting their performance.
  • Customization Limitations
    While Datadog provides extensive dashboards and visualizations, some users find the customization options to be limited compared to other monitoring solutions.
  • Support
    Some users have reported that the customer support can be slow or insufficient at times, which could be a downside when facing critical issues.

Amazon CloudWatch features and specs

  • Comprehensive Monitoring
    Amazon CloudWatch offers extensive monitoring capabilities for AWS resources, applications, and services, providing real-time insights into system performance and operational health.
  • Scalability
    CloudWatch can handle monitoring data for resources at any scale, from small test environments to large-scale production deployments, easily scaling with your AWS infrastructure.
  • Seamless AWS Integration
    As a native AWS service, CloudWatch integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like EC2, RDS, S3, and Lambda, simplifying the process of setting up and managing monitoring.
  • Custom Metrics
    Users can publish their own custom metrics, allowing them to monitor specific data points relevant to their use case, in addition to the default metrics provided by AWS services.
  • Automated Actions
    With CloudWatch Alarms, users can set predefined thresholds to trigger automated actions such as sending notifications, executing Lambda functions, or altering auto-scaling groups.

Possible disadvantages of Amazon CloudWatch

  • Cost
    Depending on usage, monitoring a large number of resources or high-resolution custom metrics can become costly, potentially impacting overall cloud expenditure.
  • Complexity
    Although CloudWatch is powerful, it can be complex to set up and manage, particularly for users not familiar with AWS terminology and monitoring concepts.
  • Limited Third-Party Integration
    While CloudWatch integrates well with AWS services, integration with third-party tools is not as seamless. This might require additional configuration or third-party solutions for comprehensive monitoring.
  • Lag in Metric Visibility
    There can be a slight delay in the visibility of data points, especially for high-resolution metrics, which may delay immediate troubleshooting and resolution.
  • Basic Dashboarding
    The default dashboards provided by CloudWatch can be quite basic and may not meet the advanced visualization needs of some users, requiring additional tools for creating more sophisticated dashboards.

Datadog videos

Datadog Review & Walkthrough

More videos:

  • Review - DataDog: What it is and where its going
  • Review - Datadog: 2-Minute Tour

Amazon CloudWatch videos

No Amazon CloudWatch videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Datadog and Amazon CloudWatch)
Monitoring Tools
83 83%
17% 17
Log Management
86 86%
14% 14
Performance Monitoring
Project Management
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Datadog and Amazon CloudWatch

Datadog Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
10 Best Datadog Alternatives to Consider in 2023 Datadog is one of the most potent and versatile players on the market, but they have their fair share of downsides. The monitoring and observability space is quite competitive, so we will discuss 10 of the best Datadog alternatives and compare their pros and cons to determine which is better suited for your needs.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 10 Grafana Alternatives in 2024
While all Grafana alternatives do not offer pricing transparency, go for a flexible pricing structure that fits your budget. Tools like Datadog offer pricing based on data volume or monitoring scope, while Middleware offers a flexible pay-as-you-go pricing structure.
Source: middleware.io
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Open Source vs. Proprietary: Determine whether an open-source solution like SigNoz or a proprietary one like Datadog better aligns with your requirements and budget. Open-source tools often offer more customization and community support, while proprietary tools may provide more comprehensive out-of-the-box features and dedicated customer service. At SigNoz, we offer both...
Source: signoz.io
10 Best Grafana Alternatives [2023 Comparison]
Datadog is a massive tool that offers a lot of features and solutions, including log management. But before we dive too deep, please note that Datadog is expensive. It absolutely is not for anyone other than large-budgeted corporations. Just take a look at what people are saying on X.
Source: sematext.com
5 Best DevSecOps Tools in 2023
There are many platforms that can be utilized for monitoring and alerting. Some examples are New Relic, Datadog, AWS CloudWatch, Sentry, Dynatrace, and others. Again, these providers each have pros and cons related to pricing, offering, ad vendor lock-in. So research the options to see what may possibly be best for a given situation.

Amazon CloudWatch Reviews

35+ Of The Best CI/CD Tools: Organized By Category
Amazon CloudWatch is a detection solution for AWS cloud applications and other resources. For instance, you can use it to monitor Amazon services such as EC2. It will automatically alert and inform you of any anomalies it detects. Additionally, Amazon CloudWatch gives you the ability to track and collect metrics.
PagerDuty Alternatives
Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications you run on AWS.
Source: zapier.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Amazon CloudWatch seems to be a lot more popular than Datadog. While we know about 71 links to Amazon CloudWatch, we've tracked only 5 mentions of Datadog. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Datadog mentions (5)

  • Send the logs of your Shuttle-powered backend to Datadog
    Ideally, if we had access to the underlying infrastructure, we could probably install the Datadog Agent and configure it to send our logs directly to Datadog, or even use AWS Lambda functions or Azure Event Hub + Azure Functions in case we were facing some specific cloud scenarios. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • I wanted a self hosted alternative to Atlassian status page so I build my own application !
    Currently supported : Datadog, Jenkins, DNS, HTTP. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Datadog on Kubernetes: Avoiding Common Pitfalls
    Datadog is a powerful monitoring and security platform that gives you visibility into end-to-end traces, application metrics, logs, and infrastructure. While Datadog has great documentation on their Kubernetes integration, we've observed that there's some missed nuance that leads to common pitfalls. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
  • Post-DockerCon spam
    .. Is to see you email address being silently distributed to every single company that I've watched a talk from. And now suddenly get several promotional spam emails per day from some 4-5 different domains like instana.com, datadoghq.com, snyk.io, cockroachlabs.com (some of them send even multiple emails per day!). Source: almost 4 years ago
  • Never write a UserService again
    We're commonly doing this with logging, using services such as Loggly or DataDog. We're using managed databases, be it on AWS, Heroku or database-vendor-specific solutions. We're storing binaries on S3. Externalising user authentication and authorization might be a good candidate as well. - Source: dev.to / about 4 years ago

Amazon CloudWatch mentions (71)

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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Datadog and Amazon CloudWatch, you can also consider the following products

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

AWS Budgets - Cloud Cost Management

Dynatrace - Cloud-based quality testing, performance monitoring and analytics for mobile apps and websites. Get started with Keynote today!

AWS Cost Explorer - Cloud Cost Management

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

AppDynamics - Get real-time insight from your apps using Application Performance Management—how they’re being used, how they’re performing, where they need help.

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