Datadog vs. Grafana

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Datadog
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Datadog is a monitoring service for IT, Dev and Ops teams who write and run applications at scale, and want to turn the massive amounts of data produced by their apps, tools and services into actionable insight.
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Grafana
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Grafana is a data visualization tool developed by Grafana Labs in New York. It is available open source, managed (Grafana Cloud), or via an enterprise edition with enhanced features. Grafana has pluggable data source model and comes bundled with support for popular time series databases like Graphite. It also has built-in support for cloud monitoring vendors like Amazon Cloudwatch, Microsoft Azure and SQL databases like MySQL. Grafana can combine data from many places into a single dashboard.
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Pricing
DatadogGrafana
Editions & Modules
Log Management
$1.27
per month (billed annually) per host
Infrastructure
$15.00
per month (billed annually) per host
Standard
$18
per month per host
Enterprise
$27
per month per host
DevSecOps Pro
$27
per month per host
APM
$31.00
per month (billed annually) per host
DevSecOps Enterprise
$41
per month per host
Grafana Cloud - Pro
$8
per month up to 1 active user
Grafana Cloud - Free
Free
10k metrics + 50GB logs + 50GB traces up to 3 active users
Grafana Cloud - Advanced
Volume Discounts
custom data usage custom active users
Grafana - Enterprise Stack
Custom Pricing
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
DatadogGrafana
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsDiscount available for annual pricing. Multi-Year/Volume discounts available (500+ hosts/mo).
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
DatadogGrafana
Features
DatadogGrafana
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.0
Ratings
5% below category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
6.8
Ratings
16% below category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
8.4
Ratings
0% below category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Datadog
-
Ratings
Grafana
7.7
Ratings
6% below category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
DatadogGrafana
Small Businesses
InfluxDB
InfluxDB
Score 8.8 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Sumo Logic
Sumo Logic
Score 9.4 out of 10
Supermetrics
Supermetrics
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
NetBrain Technologies
NetBrain Technologies
Score 9.2 out of 10
Dataiku
Dataiku
Score 7.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
DatadogGrafana
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
DatadogGrafana
Likelihood to Recommend
A one-stop solution for everything you need. Multiple functionalities are tailored to meet specific business needs. Logs are essential for any business, and Datadog manages logs effectively. Rum sessions are something new to me and have given us a new perspective on how to reverse engineer issues that we see for our customers.
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Just about any organization with more than one server and more than one cluster as it scales very well. Configuration of the application takes time and finesse to fine tune to where the balance of load time and getting data quickly meets. The plugins add load time but fine tuning for the application to meet demand needs nailed down at implementation
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Pros
  • Create Dashboards as per application, environments, and Custom metrics in one panel.
  • Log aggregation, one-stop Application monitoring tools for the whole infrastructure.
  • Playbooks, SLA definition, success and error quotas, request visualizations.
  • DB monitoring, Serverless stack monitoring.
  • Alerting of Production incidents so we can quickly resolve the issues on time.
Read full review
  • Alerting through many different medium as Slack, Email, Webhook etc
  • Beautiful and unlimited number of dashboards to view your metrics and tweak them as you please
  • Log aggregation and powerful Logql to filter and view your logs
  • Microservices monitoring
  • Large number of plugins and data sources to collect your metrics from almost anywhere
Read full review
Cons
  • Alert windows cause lag in notifications (e.g. if the alert window is X errors in 1 hour, we won't get alerted until the end of the 1 hour range)
  • I would appreciate more supportive examples for how to filter and view metrics in the explorer
  • I would like a more clear interface for metrics that are missing in a time frame, rather than only showing tags/etc. for metrics that were collected within the currently viewed time frame
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  • Documentation needs to be more clarified since it can be confusing for beginners
  • Notification alert message templates need to be simplified
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Usability
Datadog's user interface is quite friendly and easy to navigate. With menus clearly categorized, and ability to bookmark important dashboards, one can easily find what they're looking for. For dashboards, ability to move and resize visualizations and group them, is really helpful to organize dashboards. Automatic suggestions from Datadog for important visualizations based on the metrics and logs would provide another level of ease of use.
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Great usage in terms of monitoring of any application from backend to frontend and even any AWS resource via cloud watch and other connectors. Easy to use and configure personalised dash boarding and alerting features. Cost efficient and easy to setup and run, no mazor scaling challenges in terms of managing and maintaining the stack, easy to configure via Prometheus, influx and other connectors
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Support Rating
The support team usually gets it right. We did have a rather complicate issue setting up monitoring on a domain controller. However, they are usually responsive and helpful over chat. The downside would be I don’t think they have any phone support. If that is important to you this might not be a good fit.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
I selected Datadog because of its features and the wide range of integration support. As I already told it supports more that 600+ integrations which helps and organization to keep everything in a single place and also its AI feature which is reducing the time for root cause analysis. Its custom dashboards features which helps us to visualize the data in a more attractive way.
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Grafana is more flexible, readily adopts other tools frameworks instead of forcing you to use their agent, doesn't force you into Vendor lock-in, and embraces open source, self-hosted, and Enterprise. Similar companies would like you to use their specific tooling and don't offer nearly as much flexibility. The other thing I like about Grafana is their storage usage is much lower compared to similar tools and competitors
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Return on Investment
  • Saved us (time & money) from developing our own monitoring utilities that would pale in comparison
  • Alerts allow us to remedy issues before our customers even know about them
  • Tracking resource usage over time allows us to better plan for future needs, before it becomes a pain-point.
Read full review
  • It has kicked out some of our paid monitoring and visualization tools.
  • Now Monitoring, Visualization and Alerting is being done in a single platform.
  • It made monitoring and visualization very easy for us.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Datadog Screenshots

Screenshot of the out-of-the-box and customizable monitoring dashboards.Screenshot of Datadog's collaboration features, where users can discuss issues in-context with production data, annotate changes and notify their teams, see who responded to that alert before, and discover what was done to fix it.Screenshot of where Datadog unifies traces, metrics, and logs—the three pillars of observability.Screenshot of some of Datadog's 400+ built-in integrations.Screenshot of Datadog's Service Map, which decomposes an application into all its component services and draws the observed dependencies between these services in real timeScreenshot of centralized log data, pulled from any source.