Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Bigpanda vs Datadog: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Bigpanda and Datadog, two popular monitoring and observability platforms used by organizations for infrastructure and application monitoring.
Data Collection and Metrics: Bigpanda focuses on aggregating and correlating data from various monitoring tools and systems, allowing users to gain a unified view of their infrastructure. It collects data from a wide range of sources such as logs, metrics, and events. On the other hand, Datadog also offers data collection capabilities but emphasizes real-time metrics and instrumentation. It supports various integrations and provides extensive out-of-the-box monitoring functionalities.
Analytics and Visualization: Bigpanda offers advanced analytics capabilities to help identify and prioritize incidents by analyzing patterns in data. It provides machine learning algorithms to detect anomalies and predict incidents. Moreover, it offers visual dashboards to present the aggregated data in an easily understandable format. In contrast, Datadog also provides analytical tools and customizable dashboards for visualizing and analyzing metrics and logs, but its focus is more on real-time monitoring and alerting.
Alerting and Notification: Bigpanda offers intelligent alert management by consolidating alerts from different sources and correlating them based on their relevance. It reduces alert fatigue by grouping related alerts and allowing users to define escalation policies. It also integrates with various notification channels to notify the relevant parties. In comparison, Datadog provides robust alerting capabilities with real-time alert notifications and incident tracking. It allows users to set thresholds, define notification channels, and collaborate on resolving incidents.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Bigpanda provides extensive support for infrastructure monitoring, including cloud platforms, servers, networks, and applications. It offers integrations with popular infrastructure monitoring tools, enabling organizations to gain insights into system performance and availability. Datadog also excels in infrastructure monitoring with its comprehensive set of integrations and pre-built dashboards. It provides deep visibility into cloud resources, containers, servers, and network performance.
Application Monitoring: Bigpanda focuses on correlating and analyzing application-level data to identify issues and trends. It integrates with various application monitoring tools and captures metrics and events from application logs. It helps organizations understand the impact of application performance on their overall infrastructure. In contrast, Datadog provides robust application monitoring capabilities with automatic instrumentation, distributed tracing, and code profiling. It enables organizations to analyze application performance across distributed architectures and identify bottlenecks.
Integration and Ecosystem: Bigpanda offers a wide range of out-of-the-box integrations with popular monitoring tools, incident management platforms, and collaboration tools. It aims to bring together various data sources into a single platform. Datadog also provides a rich ecosystem of integrations, allowing users to collect data from different sources and tools. It offers extensive integrations with cloud platforms, infrastructure, and applications, alongside integrations with incident management and collaboration platforms.
In summary, Bigpanda focuses on aggregating and correlating data, offering advanced analytics and centralized alert management for unified incident resolution. Datadog, on the other hand, also emphasizes real-time monitoring and alerting, with a strong focus on infrastructure and application performance across distributed architectures. Both platforms provide extensive integrations and visualization capabilities, catering to different monitoring and observability 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.
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 Bigpanda
- User interface, easy setup, analytics, integrations7
- Consolidates many systems into one6
- Correlation engine2
- Quick setup1
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
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Bigpanda
Cons of Datadog
- Expensive20
- No errors exception tracking4
- External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging2
- Complicated1