Datadog

I work at Volvo Car Corporation as a consultant Project Manager. We have deployed Zabbix in all of our factories for factory monitoring because after thorough investigation we saw that Zabbix supports the wide variety of Operating Systems, hardware peripherals and devices a Car Manufacturer has.

No other tool had the same amount of support onboard for our production environment and we didn't want to end up using a different tool again for several areas. That is the major strong point about Zabbix and it's free of course. Another strong point is the documentation which is widely available; Zabbix Youtube channel with tutorial video's, Zabbix share which holds free templates, the Zabbix online documentation and the Zabbix forum also helped us out quite a bit. Deployment is quite easy since it uses templates, so almost all configuration can be done on server side.

To conclude, we are really pleased with the tool so far, it helped us detect several causes of issues that were a pain to solve in the past.

Centreon is part of the Nagios ecosystem, meaning there is a huge number of resources you may find around in the community (plugins, skills, addons). Zabbix monitoring paradigms are totally different from Centreon. Centreon plugins have some kind of intelligence when they are launched, where Zabbix monitoring rules are configured centrally with the raw data collected. Testing both will help you understand :) Users used to say Centreon may be faster for setup and deployment. And in the end, both are full of monitoring features. Centreon has out of the box a full catalog of probes from cloud to the edge https://www.centreon.com/en/plugins-pack-list/ As soon as you have defined your monitoring policies and template, you can deploy it fast through command line API or REST API. Centreon plays well in the ITSM, Automation, AIOps spaces with many connectors for Prometheus, ServiceNow, GLPI, Ansible, Chef, Splunk, ... The polling server mode is one of the differentiators with Centreon. You set up remote server(s) and chose btw multiple information-exchange mechanisms. Powerful and resilient for remote, VPN, DMZ, satellite networks. Centreon is a good value for price to do a data collection (availability, performance, fault) on a wide range of technologies (physical, legacy, cloud). There are pro support and enterprise version with dashboards and reporting. IT Central Station gathers many user feedback you can rely on both Centreon & Zabbix https://www.itcentralstation.com/products/centreon-reviews  

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.

If you want to get deep insights and fast issue resolution have a look at INSTANA.

There is a public sandbox to get first insights and feeling for the tool. If you like it you can also run a free trial if you like.

The Datadog statsd agent is not really a normal statsd client: it implements a large subset of the original (etsy) features, but also some Datadog-specific features (about histograms). It is used to send metrics to Datadog APM, and its big advantage is the developer experience, which is familiar and easy to use, just like any statsd client, making it trivial to replace an existing statsd metrics client in any application with the Datadog version to publish metrics to Datadog.

Via acquisitions and internal product developments over the last year+, Splunk provides really differentiated APM and monitoring for microservices and AWS. I'd recommend giving it a peak if you haven't yet! For some validation, a recent Cloud Observability vendor report by GigaOm came out and ranked Splunk as the "top performer" in the space. Hope this helps in your search

We use a combination of Java and C# microservices on AWS. We started off with CloudWatch but found it severely lacking - even for basic logging functionality; mostly because the way it sets up log groups is not very useful for distributed applications. It gets hard to find the right logs for the right instance; the interface is rather lacking, etc.

We looked into several alternatives. Our final decision fell upon: - Datadog, bundled with every docker image during the CI/CD build process. Datadog has agents easily hook into our existing processes. No real code had to be changed other than the build script and the Dockerfile (https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/setup_overview/setup/java/?tab=containers). Datadog has been very good at providing insights on many different levels (performance, errors, infrastructure load) and can be set up to send automated alerts when unexpected behavior happens. - Kibana, to centralize our logging into a more easily searchable and filterable configuration.

I would also recommend considering Dynatrace. I believe it comes at a higher price, but I fondly look back to my time working with the tool in the past. Dynatrace is remarkably deep and smart; it ended up being very good at helping us find tricky issues like memory leaks, it helped us monitor performance, trace user paths throughout our apps and so much more. I understand they've evolved quite a bit since I last used them, investing heavily into AI components to improve the experience. Worth the consideration.