Datadog

Pros

I think that the best features that Datadog has is that you can track and follow logs in real time, something really important to have if your project is live. I like the idea of creating custom views of sets of logs (with custom filters, data parsing and a lot more) and that you can share them with your team.

Cons

It is a bit complicated to set for the first time. Is not quite easy to use or know at first about all the available features that Datadog has. Interface is tricky and can be a blocker sometimes. Following that, if your fields are not mapped in the right way, filters are not that useful.

Pros

- The filter functionality is great which lets you filter out errors for quick analysis, can easily create custom dashboards.
- Great Visualizations, easy to set up dashboards/monitors with options do maths like ratios, rates, average, interval.
- It can be easily integrated with other apps like Slack to set alerts for failed jobs.
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Cons

- A slow learning curve, lack of resources on how to get useful functionality from UI or APIs.
- UI sometimes be bit slower although not bad if you've integrated with multiple external apps.

Pros

Dashboards. Custom metrics. Ruby integration. Notebooks. Monitors & alerts.

Cons

It takes time to understand each part and understand how to use it. It's a complex thing and if you're not familiar with monitoring systems it could be difficult to figure it out how you can find what you need.

Pros

Looks like it should do the job, less log limits than other products.

Cons

Spent days trying to get it working on a pretty vanilla Windows VM but never could get it up and running. Support pretty much just told me to read the documentation which wasn't really helpful after going over it ten times already. Had similar problem with another product and they could tell me the exact lines of the config and registry that needed changing.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Datadog

Switched From

Pros

I truly enjoy the integrations that datadog provides. It allows us to view more metrics that are more of a deep dive into specific applications. These metrics help us understand what is widely monitored in the industry that we did not think about monitoring ourself.
Another key item is that datadog comes out of the box systematic checks that we normally had to add in manually for a newly onboarded host.

Cons

The item I dislike least is that when you decommission a host the application requires up to 24 hours for that host to officially disappear from the list rather than being removed immediately.