AppDynamics vs Datadog

Overview

AppDynamics

Stacks305

Followers629

Votes68

Datadog

Stacks9.8K

Followers8.2K

Votes861

AppDynamics vs Datadog: What are the differences?

AppDynamics and Datadog are two popular application performance monitoring (APM) tools that help businesses monitor the performance and availability of their applications. While both tools provide similar functionalities, there are key differences that set them apart. This article outlines the key differences between AppDynamics and Datadog.

Installation and Setup: AppDynamics requires a more involved installation process compared to Datadog. AppDynamics requires agents to be installed on the application servers, while Datadog provides a lightweight agentless approach, making it easier to set up and get started quickly.
Supported Technologies: AppDynamics offers better support for specialized or legacy technologies, such as mainframes and SAP, while Datadog primarily focuses on modern technologies like containers, microservices, and cloud-native architectures. If your application infrastructure heavily relies on specialized technologies, AppDynamics is likely to provide better visibility and monitoring capabilities.
Integration Ecosystem: Datadog has a more extensive integration ecosystem compared to AppDynamics. Datadog offers native integrations with a wide range of popular DevOps and monitoring tools, including Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, and Slack, allowing for seamless data sharing and collaboration. AppDynamics, while offering integrations with popular tools, has a more limited ecosystem.
Pricing Model: AppDynamics follows a traditional licensing model, where you pay based on the number of agents or servers being monitored. On the other hand, Datadog follows a more flexible pricing model, charging based on the volume of data ingested and analyzed. This makes Datadog more suitable for businesses with fluctuating workloads or scaling requirements.
Analytics and Visualization: AppDynamics offers advanced analytics and visualization capabilities, including code-level diagnostics and transaction tracing, enabling deep insights into application performance and bottleneck identification. While Datadog provides solid analytics and visualization features, it may not offer the same level of granular detail and code-level visibility as AppDynamics.
Alerting and Collaboration: Datadog provides a robust alerting and collaboration system, allowing you to set up flexible alerting conditions and notifications, as well as providing integration with popular collaboration tools like PagerDuty and Slack. While AppDynamics also offers alerting functionality, it may not have the same breadth of integrations and flexibility as Datadog.

In summary, AppDynamics requires a more involved installation process and offers better support for specialized technologies, while Datadog provides a lighter agentless approach, a broader integration ecosystem, and a more flexible pricing model. Both tools provide excellent monitoring capabilities, but the choice depends on the specific needs and preferences of your organization.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs

CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on AppDynamics, Datadog

Medeti

Jun 27, 2020

Needs adviceon

Amazon EKS

Kubernetes

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

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?

1.51M views1.51M

Comments

Benoit

Principal Engineer at Sqreen

Sep 17, 2019

Decided

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

457k views457k

Comments

Attila

Founder at artkonekt

Mar 24, 2020

Decided

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.

471k views471k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

AppDynamics	Datadog
AppDynamics develops application performance management (APM) solutions that deliver problem resolution for highly distributed applications through transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics.	Datadog is the leading service for cloud-scale monitoring. It is used by IT, operations, and development teams who build and operate applications that run on dynamic or hybrid cloud infrastructure. Start monitoring in minutes with Datadog!
End User Monitoring;Real-Time Business Transaction Monitoring;Visualize & Manage your Entire Application;Detect Business Impact and Performance Spikes;Isolate Bottlenecks in your Application;Identify Root Cause with Complete Code diagnostics;Kickass for Business: Reports;Kickass for Ops: Dashboards;Kickass for Dev: Agile Comparison	14-day Free Trial for an unlimited number of hosts;200+ turn-key integrations for data aggregation;Clean graphs of StatsD and other integrations;Slice and dice graphs and alerts by tags, roles, and more;Easy-to-use search for hosts, metrics, and tags;Alert notifications via e-mail and PagerDuty;Receive alerts on any metric, for a single host or an entire cluster;Full API access in more than 15 languages;Overlay metrics and events across disparate sources;Out-of-the-box and customizable monitoring dashboards;Easy way to compute rates, ratios, averages, or integrals;Sampling intervals of 10 seconds;Mute all alerts with 1 click during upgrades and maintenance;Tools for team collaboration
Statistics
Stacks 305	Stacks 9.8K
Followers 629	Followers 8.2K
Votes 68	Votes 861
Pros & Cons
Pros 21 Deep code visibility 13 Powerful 8 Real-Time Visibility 7 Great visualization 6 Easy Setup Cons 5 Expensive 2 Poor to non-existent integration with aws services	Pros 140 Monitoring for many apps (databases, web servers, etc) 107 Easy setup 87 Powerful ui 84 Powerful integrations 70 Great value Cons 20 Expensive 4 No errors exception tracking 2 External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging 1 Complicated
Integrations
Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure Amazon EC2 RightScale CloudBees HP Cloud Compute Boundary PagerDuty	NGINX Google App Engine Apache HTTP Server Java Docker Pingdom MySQL Ruby Python Memcached

What are some alternatives to AppDynamics, Datadog?

New Relic

The world’s best software and DevOps teams rely on New Relic to move faster, make better decisions and create best-in-class digital experiences. If you run software, you need to run New Relic. More than 50% of the Fortune 100 do too.

Raygun

Raygun gives you a window into how users are really experiencing your software applications. Detect, diagnose and resolve issues that are affecting end users with greater speed and accuracy.

AppSignal

AppSignal gives you and your team alerts and detailed metrics about your Ruby, Node.js or Elixir application. Sensible pricing, no aggressive sales & support by developers.

Stackify

Stackify offers the only developers-friendly innovative cloud based solution that fully integrates application performance management (APM) with error and log. Allowing them to easily monitor, detect and resolve application issues faster

Skylight

Skylight is a smart profiler for your Rails apps that visualizes request performance across all of your servers.

Librato

Librato provides a complete solution for monitoring and understanding the metrics that impact your business at all levels of the stack. We provide everything you need to visualize, analyze, and actively alert on the metrics that matter to you.

Keymetrics

PM2 is a production process manager for Node.js applications with a built-in load balancer. It allows you to keep applications alive forever, to reload them without downtime and to facilitate common system admin tasks.

Dynatrace

It is an AI-powered, full stack, automated performance management solution. It provides user experience analysis that identifies and resolves application performance issues faster than ever before.

SignalFx

We provide operational intelligence for today’s elastic architectures through monitoring specifically designed for microservices and containers with: -powerful and proactive alerting -metrics aggregation -visualization into time series data

Scout

Scout APM helps developers quickly pinpoint & resolve performance issues before the customer ever sees them. Spend less time debugging & more time building with a streamlined interface & tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to source code.

Related Comparisons

AppDynamics vs Datadog: What are the differences?

Installation and Setup: AppDynamics requires a more involved installation process compared to Datadog. AppDynamics requires agents to be installed on the application servers, while Datadog provides a lightweight agentless approach, making it easier to set up and get started quickly.
Supported Technologies: AppDynamics offers better support for specialized or legacy technologies, such as mainframes and SAP, while Datadog primarily focuses on modern technologies like containers, microservices, and cloud-native architectures. If your application infrastructure heavily relies on specialized technologies, AppDynamics is likely to provide better visibility and monitoring capabilities.
Integration Ecosystem: Datadog has a more extensive integration ecosystem compared to AppDynamics. Datadog offers native integrations with a wide range of popular DevOps and monitoring tools, including Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, and Slack, allowing for seamless data sharing and collaboration. AppDynamics, while offering integrations with popular tools, has a more limited ecosystem.
Pricing Model: AppDynamics follows a traditional licensing model, where you pay based on the number of agents or servers being monitored. On the other hand, Datadog follows a more flexible pricing model, charging based on the volume of data ingested and analyzed. This makes Datadog more suitable for businesses with fluctuating workloads or scaling requirements.
Analytics and Visualization: AppDynamics offers advanced analytics and visualization capabilities, including code-level diagnostics and transaction tracing, enabling deep insights into application performance and bottleneck identification. While Datadog provides solid analytics and visualization features, it may not offer the same level of granular detail and code-level visibility as AppDynamics.
Alerting and Collaboration: Datadog provides a robust alerting and collaboration system, allowing you to set up flexible alerting conditions and notifications, as well as providing integration with popular collaboration tools like PagerDuty and Slack. While AppDynamics also offers alerting functionality, it may not have the same breadth of integrations and flexibility as Datadog.

AppDynamics vs Datadog

Overview