Attila Fulop

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.

Considering that you mention "isn't easy for beginners" I'd suggest Forge and Digital Ocean. They're still the most simple ones available out there. Docker would be a good solution too, but there you need to understand docker and the services you're connecting to, and some level of orchestration. In my experience, these are not trivial at all, especially for beginners.

Envoyer comes into the picture as a missing piece that can be used for deployment, and integrates with Forge and DO quite well.

I'd be happy to help you with a basic setup (DM me on Twitter or Github).

We've been using Zoom for about a half a year and it's stability is unbeatable. We have all-hands on Fridays with 100+ participants. The free tier can easily handle the requirements, the only limitation is that max meeting length is 40 minutes. After that you can immediately restart the meeting, but the pro option is also very affordable. It also features screen sharing and whiteboard sharing out of the box. I also appreciate that it's not mandatory to register an account to attend a meeting.

For that particular purpose, I recommend UptimeRobot. It is a simple and affordable service and does exactly what you need. It also comes with status pages which makes it a really good deal.

Site 24x7 can also be used for the same purpose, which has basically the same features as UptimeRobot. If you like the UI and the features better - go with that one.

Datadog in turn is a complete telemetry platform and was designed for much more versatile application and infrastructre monitoring. Its pricing - according to that - is much higher. We've been using both Datadog and UptimeRobot, and for the use case you mentioned UptimeRobot is our choice.

Which Graph DB features are you planning to use?

Disclaimer: I am the primary author of the Vanilo Framework 🙂

The main idea behind Vanilo is that it's as Laravel native as possible. If you also prefer Laravel - I do - then Vanilo is a good choice as it was built with the same patterns as Laravel.