Datadog

1. Stackdriver is no longer a product on it's own. It's the "Monitoring" feature in Google cloud. If you're on Google cloud - it's the easiest way to set up logging.
2. Datadog is one of the 3 most expensive tools for logging, It's a SaaS product like Splunk and New Relic. Only use them if you have high budget and consider your logs at least as holy as the bible.
3. Sentry is not related to logging, but it can report errors and crashes in your application. Mixing up those tools tells me you're not really familiar with monitoring in general. I suggest learning a bit more, it's easy to get monitoring wrong and ending up shipping and storing masses of useless logs. Good luck.

Hi Sathish,

Straightforward responding you: Will the shift from Datadog to Grafana be a wise move? R: Maybe, specially in the long run.

and flawless? R: It depends, but I don't think so. And it also won't be so smooth. You'll reach a point of Datatog deprec where your team will be supporting both, and at this peak will be when you'll think it was a bad move, because you'll be paying for Datadog and Prometheus/Grafana servers, plus your team will have to work on new system metrics and fine tuning metric queries and graphs on Grafana, so you can expect a delay on business deliveries. Your team will feel overburdened.

So bear in mind that basically you'll be moving from an out of the box monitoring solution to your own. The analogy I'd do is to moving out from a cloud provider to your own self managed servers, though way less complex of course.

Grafana itself won't do the trick. You'll need a data scrapper system like Prometheus to collect metrics/data from your app, or use a middleware Pushgateway to receive these data so Prometheus can scrape them. To do this you'll need some backend work to expose metrics data, instead of HTTP post your metrics data to Datadog, so you can expect a little re-architecture or engineering on that, depending on how your system is designed.

In the long run, you'll probably need a team focused only on that: to take care of the Prometheus/Grafana updates as well as their servers (after all they're still systems that need to be managed).

I think all of this will depend on the size of your company now and your teams (which I advise you to include them on that decision), and your budget plus rush for business deliveries. In the long run it'll pay, for your company will be more specialized on this stack, and you can have a team focused on that plus developer support.

If you wanna go with it, I'd suggest to do a small PoC (which still will need a good amount of work). Select a project (or even an endpoint/ mobile feature) to have both integrations: Datadog plus Grafana, and do the same graphs you have on Datadog to Grafana. I think this way you can have a better picture of the reality on how that will be for your company.

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

Maurice - Datadog allows you to monitor microservices by unifying metrics, traces, and logs all in one place. Enabling you to visualize how services interact at a glance so you can quickly locate problems and begin troubleshooting. On top of that you can monitor complex dependencies, investigate possible points of failure, and set smart alerts for proactive monitoring. In my opinion Datadog offers the most comprehensive tool with the simplest UI.