Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Datadog vs StatsD: What are the differences?
What is Datadog? Unify logs, metrics, and traces from across your distributed infrastructure. 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!.
What is StatsD? Simple daemon for easy stats aggregation. StatsD is a front-end proxy for the Graphite/Carbon metrics server, originally written by Etsy's Erik Kastner. StatsD is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).
Datadog can be classified as a tool in the "Performance Monitoring" category, while StatsD is grouped under "Monitoring Tools".
Some of the features offered by Datadog are:
- 14-day Free Trial for an unlimited number of hosts
- 200+ turn-key integrations for data aggregation
- Clean graphs of StatsD and other integrations
On the other hand, StatsD provides the following key features:
- buckets: Each stat is in its own "bucket". They are not predefined anywhere. Buckets can be named anything that will translate to Graphite (periods make folders, etc)
- values: Each stat will have a value. How it is interpreted depends on modifiers. In general values should be integer.
- flush: After the flush interval timeout (defined by config.flushInterval, default 10 seconds), stats are aggregated and sent to an upstream backend service.
"Monitoring for many apps (databases, web servers, etc)" is the primary reason why developers consider Datadog over the competitors, whereas "Single responsibility" was stated as the key factor in picking StatsD.
StatsD is an open source tool with 14.2K GitHub stars and 1.83K GitHub forks. Here's a link to StatsD's open source repository on GitHub.
Airbnb, Facebook, and Spotify are some of the popular companies that use Datadog, whereas StatsD is used by Lyft, Shopify, and OpenGov. Datadog has a broader approval, being mentioned in 541 company stacks & 223 developers stacks; compared to StatsD, which is listed in 72 company stacks and 16 developer stacks.
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)136
- Easy setup106
- Powerful ui86
- Powerful integrations82
- Great value69
- Great visualization53
- Events + metrics = clarity45
- Custom metrics40
- Notifications40
- Flexibility38
- Free & paid plans18
- Great customer support15
- Makes my life easier14
- Adapts automatically as i scale up9
- Easy setup and plugins8
- Super easy and powerful7
- AWS support6
- In-context collaboration6
- Rich in features5
- Docker support4
- Cost4
- Automation tools3
- Source control and bug tracking3
- Simple, powerful, great for infra3
- Cute logo3
- Expensive3
- Easy to Analyze3
- Full visibility of applications3
- Monitor almost everything3
- Best than others3
- Good for Startups2
- Free setup2
- Best in the field2
- APM1
Pros of StatsD
- Open source9
- Single responsibility7
- Efficient wire format5
- Loads of integrations3
- Handles aggregation3
- Many implementations1
- Scales well1
- Simple to use1
- NodeJS1
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Datadog
- Expensive19
- No errors exception tracking4
- External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging2
- Complicated1
Cons of StatsD
- No authentication; cannot be used over Internet1
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is Datadog?
What is StatsD?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+32
+12
+29
+42+31
+22+46+34