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Blackfire.io vs Datadog: What are the differences?
Introduction:
Blackfire.io and Datadog are both performance monitoring tools used in the field of web development. While they serve similar purposes, they do have key differences in terms of their features and capabilities. In this article, we will explore six key differences between Blackfire.io and Datadog.
Deployment Capabilities: Blackfire.io is primarily focused on PHP performance monitoring and profiling, offering deep insights into PHP applications. On the other hand, Datadog is a comprehensive monitoring solution that supports a variety of languages and platforms, including but not limited to PHP. It provides a more encompassing view of your entire infrastructure and applications.
Integration Options: Blackfire.io provides seamless integration with development tools like IDEs, version control systems, and continuous integration systems. This allows developers to easily profile their code and monitor performance throughout the development process. Datadog, on the other hand, offers a wide range of integrations with various third-party tools and services, enabling developers to monitor and analyze the performance of their entire tech stack.
Real-time Monitoring: Blackfire.io offers real-time code profiling and performance monitoring, providing developers with immediate feedback on the performance impact of their code changes. Datadog also supports real-time monitoring but focuses more on system metrics and infrastructure monitoring rather than code profiling.
Alerting and Notification: While both Blackfire.io and Datadog provide alerting and notification capabilities, there are differences in the level of granularity. Blackfire.io allows developers to set up alerts based on specific performance metrics and thresholds, providing fine-grained control over when and how they receive notifications. Datadog, on the other hand, offers comprehensive alerting features that cover a wide range of system metrics and events, allowing for more holistic monitoring and notification strategies.
Machine Learning Capabilities: Datadog incorporates machine learning algorithms to automatically detect anomalies in performance data and provide intelligent insights. This enables developers to quickly identify and address potential performance issues without manual intervention. Blackfire.io, however, does not have built-in machine learning capabilities and relies more on manual analysis and profiling to identify performance bottlenecks.
Pricing Model: Blackfire.io offers a tiered pricing model based on the number of profiles and team members. While it provides a free plan with limited features, deeper insights and advanced features require a paid subscription. On the other hand, Datadog has a pricing model based on the volume of metric data and the number of hosts being monitored. It also offers a free plan for limited usage, making it more suitable for organizations with larger infrastructure and monitoring needs.
In Summary, Blackfire.io is specifically focused on PHP performance monitoring and offers seamless integration with development tools, real-time monitoring, fine-grained alerting, and a tiered pricing model. On the other hand, Datadog provides a comprehensive monitoring solution for multiple languages and platforms, extensive integrations, machine learning capabilities, holistic alerting, and a pricing model based on metric volume and infrastructure size. Choose Blackfire.io for deep PHP profiling, while Datadog is a suitable option for broader infrastructure monitoring needs.
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.
Coming from a Ruby background, we've been users of New Relic for quite some time. When we adopted Elixir, the New Relic integration was young and missing essential features, so we gave AppSignal a try. It worked for quite some time, we even implemented a :telemetry reporter for AppSignal . But it was difficult to correlate data in two monitoring solutions, New Relic was undergoing a UI overhaul which made it difficult to use, and AppSignal was missing the flexibility we needed. We had some fans of Datadog, so we gave it a try and it worked out perfectly. Datadog works great with Ruby , Elixir , JavaScript , and has powerful features our engineers love to use (notebooks, dashboards, very flexible alerting). Cherry on top - thanks to the Datadog Terraform provider everything is written as code, allowing us to collaborate on our Datadog setup.
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 Blackfire.io
- Deep insights into PHP request cycle7
- Performance profiling5
- Intuitive UI2
Pros of Datadog
- Monitoring for many apps (databases, web servers, etc)139
- 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
- AWS support7
- In-context collaboration7
- Rich in features6
- Docker support5
- Cost4
- Full visibility of applications4
- Monitor almost everything4
- Cute logo4
- Automation tools4
- Source control and bug tracking4
- Simple, powerful, great for infra4
- Easy to Analyze4
- Best than others4
- Best in the field3
- Expensive3
- Good for Startups3
- Free setup3
- APM2
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Cons of Blackfire.io
Cons of Datadog
- Expensive20
- No errors exception tracking4
- External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging2
- Complicated1
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