Datadog vs. Amazon CloudWatch Comparison

Who should you choose and why?

✋ Most important consideration

Unless you’re small and almost completely AWS native, you will want to consider an APM or observability platform beyond Amazon CloudWatch.

🤔 Strongly consider Datadog over Amazon CloudWatch if

You need multi-cloud monitoring across other cloud services (including Google Cloud Platform or Azure).
You need code profiling to identify performance issues in your code.

🤔 Slightly consider Amazon CloudWatch over Datadog if

90%+ of the cloud services you use are native to AWS.

📝 Other Notes

AWS also offers to monitor its container and Lambda services.
Datadog has over a dozen different products with almost as many pricing models.

Datadog

Datadog has been at the forefront of cloud monitoring for cloud-native companies. Its Application Performance Monitoring (APM) service is part of an extensive portfolio of complementary monitoring and observability tools. By capturing traces across various layers and services, Datadog APM provides developers with deep insights into their applications' performance, allowing for more effective troubleshooting and performance optimization.

Amazon CloudWatch

We put all the information below in an interactive quiz to make your APM and observability provider choice easy.

Get my free observability evaluation

It takes 5 minutes

“Gotchas”

Feature Comparison

Feature

Use Case Fit

Problem Resolution

Pricing

Observability

Instrumentation

Integration With Other Services

Not all observability providers have the integrations or compatibility with tools and languages like Rancher, AlertOps, or Rust.

Compliance Requirements

Compliance with standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO 27001, FedRAMP and more have been tracked and recorded.

Helpful Links

Learn about APM and Observability

Learn more about APM and Observability from our deep dive posts created with the help of the leading industry analysts in the field.

Open Source/Free APM Tools

Top 8 APM Vendors

Open Source/Free Observability Tools

What is an APM or Observability Platform?

Observability Tools

APM, Monitoring and Observability for Kubernetes

Most Important APM Features

APM vs. Observability

What is Observability?

What is Open Telemetry?

About the Author

Louis-Victor Jadavji

Louis-Victor Jadavji (or "LV") is a recognized leader in the cloud services industry. He's helped 50+ digital native companies like ModusBox, Later, and NS1 choose the right cloud stack for their applications. His work has been featured in Forbes (30 Under 30 All-Star), HuffPost, The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, and Inc. Magazine.

Other Comparisons

Take a look at our other useful comparisons in this product category.