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Datadog vs NetData: What are the differences?
Introduction
In this evaluation, we will compare the key differences between Datadog and NetData.
Deployment and Monitoring Scope: Datadog is a third-party cloud-based monitoring tool that offers a wide range of integrations and supports monitoring for various infrastructures, including servers, databases, and containers. On the other hand, NetData is an open-source tool that can be installed directly on the servers it monitors, providing real-time performance monitoring and visualization.
User Interface and Visualization: Datadog provides a comprehensive and user-friendly web interface with customizable dashboards and rich visualizations, including graphs, charts, and heatmaps. NetData, being a self-hosted solution, offers a simple yet informative web-based dashboard with real-time charts and graphs, focusing on system metrics.
Alerting and Notification: Datadog offers advanced alerting capabilities, allowing users to create customized alerts based on specific metrics or events. It provides integration with multiple notification channels, such as email, SMS, and third-party collaboration tools like Slack. On the other hand, NetData provides basic notification capabilities through simple email alerts, lacking the extensive integrations and flexibility of Datadog.
Scalability and Performance: Datadog is designed to handle scalable infrastructures and can accommodate large-scale deployments with thousands of hosts and millions of metrics. It uses a distributed architecture to ensure high performance and reliability. NetData, being a lightweight solution, is well suited for small to medium-scale deployments, and its performance may be limited when monitoring a large number of hosts or metrics.
Pricing and Cost: Datadog offers a tiered pricing model based on the number of hosts or containers monitored and the desired feature set. The cost increases with the scale of infrastructure and the level of functionality required. On the other hand, NetData is entirely free and open-source, making it an attractive option for budget-conscious users or smaller organizations with limited monitoring needs.
Community and Support: Datadog has a strong support system with comprehensive documentation, a knowledge base, and 24/7 technical support. It also has an active community that contributes to its ecosystem and provides additional resources. NetData, being an open-source project, relies heavily on community support and contributions. While it has an active user community, the level of support and documentation may vary compared to a commercial solution like Datadog.
In summary, Datadog is a comprehensive and scalable cloud-based monitoring solution with advanced features and integrations, suitable for large-scale deployments, but comes with a cost. NetData, on the other hand, is a lightweight and free open-source monitoring tool that provides real-time system metrics, making it ideal for small to medium-scale deployments with budget constraints.
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 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
- In-context collaboration7
- AWS support7
- Rich in features6
- Docker support5
- Cute logo4
- Source control and bug tracking4
- Monitor almost everything4
- Cost4
- Full visibility of applications4
- Simple, powerful, great for infra4
- Easy to Analyze4
- Best than others4
- Automation tools4
- Best in the field3
- Free setup3
- Good for Startups3
- Expensive3
- APM2
Pros of Netdata
- Free17
- Easy setup14
- Graphs are interactive12
- Montiors datasbases9
- Well maintained on github9
- Monitors nginx, redis, logs8
- Can submit metrics to Time Series databases4
- Open source3
- Easy Alert Setop2
- Netdata is also a statsd server2
- Written in C1
- GPLv31
- Zabbix0
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Cons of Datadog
- Expensive19
- No errors exception tracking4
- External Network Goes Down You Wont Be Logging2
- Complicated1
Cons of Netdata
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