Datadog vs PagerDuty

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Datadog vs PagerDuty: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the key differences between Datadog and PagerDuty. Both tools are widely used in the field of IT operations and incident management. While they have some similarities, there are several important distinctions that set them apart. Let's explore these differences in detail below.

  1. Monitoring vs Incident Management: The core focus of Datadog is monitoring, providing teams with comprehensive visibility into their infrastructure, applications, and logs. It offers real-time metrics, customizable dashboards, and alerts for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting. On the other hand, PagerDuty primarily focuses on incident management, helping teams to orchestrate and respond to incidents effectively. It provides on-call schedules, escalation policies, and alerting mechanisms to ensure timely incident resolution.

  2. Feature Set: Datadog offers a wide range of features, including infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), log management, network monitoring, and more. It provides extensive integrations with various third-party tools, allowing users to aggregate data from multiple sources. PagerDuty, in contrast, has a more focused feature set centered around incident management. It offers robust alerting capabilities, incident response automation, and powerful on-call management features.

  3. Scope of Use: Datadog is commonly used by DevOps and infrastructure teams to monitor and optimize the performance of their systems. It caters to a broader range of users, including developers, IT operations, and business stakeholders. On the other hand, PagerDuty is typically used by IT operations and DevOps teams for incident management and ensuring service availability. It is primarily focused on supporting incident response workflows.

  4. Integration Ecosystem: Datadog has a strong integration ecosystem, allowing users to collect data from various sources such as cloud providers, databases, containers, and more. It provides out-of-the-box integrations for popular technologies and services, enabling seamless data aggregation. PagerDuty also offers integrations but primarily focuses on integrations with monitoring tools, ticketing systems, and communication platforms to facilitate incident management workflows.

  5. User Interface and Experience: Datadog offers a highly intuitive and user-friendly interface, with customizable dashboards and data visualizations. It provides a comprehensive view of the infrastructure and applications, enabling users to drill down into specific metrics and logs. PagerDuty, while also user-friendly, emphasizes a streamlined incident response experience. It provides a centralized incident dashboard and powerful collaboration features to facilitate quick and effective incident resolution.

  6. Pricing Model: Datadog operates on a subscription-based pricing model, where users pay based on the number of infrastructure hosts and services being monitored. It offers tiered pricing plans with different levels of features and support. On the other hand, PagerDuty follows a user-based pricing model, where costs are based on the number of users accessing the platform and the level of functionality required.

In summary, Datadog and PagerDuty are distinct tools with different focuses. Datadog is primarily a monitoring tool that provides comprehensive visibility into infrastructure and applications, while PagerDuty is an incident management tool focused on orchestrating and managing incident response workflows. The feature sets, scope of use, integration ecosystems, user interfaces, and pricing models differ between the two tools. Each tool brings unique strengths and capabilities to the table, catering to different needs in the IT operations and incident management domains.

Advice on Datadog and PagerDuty
Farzeem Diamond Jiwani
Software Engineer at IVP · | 8 upvotes · 1.4M views
Needs advice
on
AppDynamicsAppDynamicsDatadogDatadog
and
DynatraceDynatrace

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!

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Needs advice
on
DatadogDatadogNew RelicNew Relic
and
SysdigSysdig

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?

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Replies (3)
Recommends
on
DatadogDatadog

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!

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Maik Schröder
Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

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.

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Attila Fulop
Management Advisor at artkonekt · | 2 upvotes · 307.9K views

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

https://docs.newrelic.com/docs/accounts/accounts-billing/new-relic-one-pricing-billing/new-relic-one-pricing-billing

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.

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Michael Aldridge
Systems Engineer at BetterHelp · | 4 upvotes · 76.9K views
Needs advice
on
PagerDutyPagerDuty
and
SquadcastSquadcast

I'm currently on PagerDuty, but I'm about to add enough users to go out of the starter tier, which will dramatically increase my license cost. PagerDuty is, in my experience, quite clunky, and I'm looking for alternatives. Squadcast is one I've found, and another is xMatters. Between the three, I'm currently leaning towards xMatters, but I'd like to know what people suggest.

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Replies (2)
Chris Riley
Software Architect at Fixate IO · | 3 upvotes · 33.8K views
Recommends
on
VictorOpsVictorOps

Disclosure I work at Splunk and VictorOps is a Splunk product. But I would suggest in addition to trying the others adding VO to your list. It's important to note that some of the tools are designed as Incident Response tools, others started as mass notification tools. For on-call stick to those designed for incident response.

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Piyush Shrivastava
FrontEndDev at Transfin · | 2 upvotes · 21.6K views
Recommends
on
SquadcastSquadcast

I would say to use Squadcast, the configuration is easy, provides a lot of features such as war room, RCA tracking postmortem, RBAC and they are quick to add features on request as well, recently I asked for custom on call reminders and I am sure they will add it really soon.

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Decisions about Datadog and PagerDuty
Attila Fulop

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.

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Benoit Larroque
Principal Engineer at Sqreen · | 4 upvotes · 406.2K views

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

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Pros of Datadog
Pros of PagerDuty
  • 137
    Monitoring for many apps (databases, web servers, etc)
  • 107
    Easy setup
  • 87
    Powerful ui
  • 83
    Powerful integrations
  • 70
    Great value
  • 54
    Great visualization
  • 46
    Events + metrics = clarity
  • 41
    Custom metrics
  • 41
    Notifications
  • 39
    Flexibility
  • 19
    Free & paid plans
  • 16
    Great customer support
  • 15
    Makes my life easier
  • 10
    Adapts automatically as i scale up
  • 9
    Easy setup and plugins
  • 8
    Super easy and powerful
  • 7
    AWS support
  • 7
    In-context collaboration
  • 6
    Rich in features
  • 5
    Docker support
  • 4
    Cost
  • 4
    Full visibility of applications
  • 4
    Monitor almost everything
  • 4
    Cute logo
  • 4
    Automation tools
  • 4
    Source control and bug tracking
  • 4
    Simple, powerful, great for infra
  • 4
    Easy to Analyze
  • 4
    Best than others
  • 3
    Best in the field
  • 3
    Expensive
  • 3
    Good for Startups
  • 3
    Free setup
  • 2
    APM
  • 55
    Just works
  • 23
    Easy configuration
  • 14
    Awesome alerting hub
  • 11
    Fantastic Alert aggregation and on call management
  • 9
    User-customizable alerting modes
  • 4
    Awesome tool for alerting and monitoring. Love it
  • 3
    Most reliable out of the three and it isn't even close

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Cons of Datadog
Cons of PagerDuty
  • 19
    Expensive
  • 4
    No errors exception tracking
  • 2
    External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging
  • 1
    Complicated
  • 7
    Expensive
  • 3
    Ugly UI

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