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Datadog vs Rollbar: What are the differences?
Introduction
Datadog and Rollbar are both monitoring and error tracking platforms that are commonly used in software development. While they share some similarities, there are several key differences between the two platforms that developers should be aware of.
Pricing Model: Datadog offers a usage-based pricing model, where the cost is determined by the volume of data analyzed and the number of monitored hosts. On the other hand, Rollbar offers a more simplified pricing model, based on the number of events or errors tracked per month. This difference in pricing models allows users to choose the option that best fits their needs and budget.
Scope of Monitoring: Datadog provides a comprehensive monitoring solution that covers a wide range of infrastructure and platform services, including servers, containers, cloud services, and applications. Rollbar, on the other hand, focuses specifically on error tracking and monitoring of software applications and web services. This difference makes Rollbar a more specialized tool for tracking and resolving software errors.
Integration Capabilities: Both Datadog and Rollbar offer integration capabilities with various third-party tools and services. However, Datadog provides a wider range of integrations, including popular services like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. Rollbar, on the other hand, has a narrower set of integrations, but includes popular development tools like GitHub, Jira, and Slack. This difference in integration capabilities allows users to choose the platform that aligns more closely with their specific tooling and workflow requirements.
Real-time Monitoring: Datadog provides real-time monitoring capabilities, allowing users to track and analyze events as they occur. This real-time monitoring is especially useful for quickly identifying and addressing critical issues. Rollbar, on the other hand, offers near real-time monitoring, with a slight delay in the event processing and analysis. This difference in real-time capabilities can be a deciding factor for users who require immediate visibility into their system's performance and error tracking.
Supported Languages: Datadog supports a wide range of programming languages, including popular languages like Python, Java, Ruby, and Node.js. Rollbar, on the other hand, offers even broader language support with integrations available for over 30 programming languages. This difference in language support makes Rollbar a more versatile tool for developers who work with multiple programming languages.
Visualization and Analysis: Both platforms provide visualization and analysis features for monitoring and error tracking. Datadog offers a rich set of built-in dashboards and visualization tools, allowing users to create custom visualizations and gain insights into their infrastructure and applications. Rollbar, on the other hand, focuses more on providing actionable insights and analysis specifically for software errors and exceptions. This difference in focus makes Rollbar a more specialized tool for debugging and resolving software issues.
In summary, Datadog and Rollbar differ in their pricing models, scope of monitoring, integration capabilities, real-time monitoring, supported languages, and visualization and analysis features. The choice between the two platforms depends on the specific needs and requirements of the user, with Datadog providing a more comprehensive monitoring solution and Rollbar offering specialized error tracking and monitoring for software applications.
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.
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 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
Pros of Rollbar
- Consolidates similar errors by impact74
- Centralize error management64
- Slack integration63
- Github integration58
- Usage based pricing47
- Insane customer support32
- Instant search23
- Heroku integration21
- Consolidate errors by OS18
- Great Free Plan15
- Trello integration15
- Flexible logging (not just exceptions)13
- Simple yet powerful error tracking tool11
- Multiple Language Support9
- Consolidate errors by browser7
- Easy setup6
- Query errors with RQL6
- Best rails exception handler5
- Deployment tracking is a nice free bonus5
- Awesome service5
- Simple and fast integration5
- Easy setup, friendly ui, demo, lots of integrations4
- Beat your users to the error report3
- Server-side + client-side3
- Errors Analysis3
- Clear and concise information.3
- Powerful3
- Mailgun integration2
- Easy integration with sails.js2
- Bitbucket integration2
- Clear errors on deploy or push1
- Easy Set up familiar UI that doesn't make you look dumb1
- Teams1
- Gitlab integration1
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Cons of Datadog
- Expensive20
- No errors exception tracking4
- External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging2
- Complicated1
Cons of Rollbar
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