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Dynatrace vs. Datadog Comparison

Which is the best APM and observability provider for you?

April 8, 2023

Written by
Louis-Victor Jadavji, Cofounder of Taloflow

Who should you choose and why?

âś‹ Most important consideration

  • Although both products are market leaders suitable for the enterprise, Dynatrace is better for complex hybrid environments whereas Datadog is better for cloud-native.

🤔 Strongly consider Dynatrace over Datadog if

  • You have a complex IT environment potentially spanning on premise mainframes, mid-range systems like AIX servers, a VMware vSphere estate, and clouds, and you want a solution that can cope with transactions and applications that span this complex infrastructure.
  • You want a well-integrated solution that can provide effective root cause analysis across very complex application and infrastructure architectures.
  • You want to leverage AI better when incidents occur to identify root causes and even allow the service to resolve incidents and generate post-mortems automatically.
  • You value vendors that understand how large enterprises buy infrastructure software and use it, and that has the enterprise sales and support processes to match.
  • You’re a government agency with a FedRAMP certification requirement greater than Low Impact.

🤔 Strongly consider Datadog over Dynatrace if

  • If you need a SaaS rather than on-premise installation.
  • You run the cloud team at your company and you wanted to get started quickly with something that monitors your cloud infrastructure.
  • You want to be able to grow the functionality (and the cost) of your Observability solution over time as your needs dictate.
  • You are sensitive to cost and expect to use a large number of hosts of a reasonable size (16GB+). DataDog is almost always cheaper than Dynatrace, and the latter also tends to charge the same for development and staging environments.
  • You want to work with many integrations/connectors and give your developers optionality (especially in the future) in terms of ready-made integrations.

📝Other Notes

  • Relative to Dynatrace, Datadog has much better support for middleware.
  • These two vendors (Datadog and Dynatrace) are the functionality and market leaders in the APM and Observability spaces. However they have very different ways of going to market, and the products are not the same, so your experience as a customer will be different depending upon which vendor you choose.
Dynatrace

Dynatrace

Dynatrace provides an APM that supports multiple languages, application architectures, cloud, on-premises or hybrid, enterprise applications, SaaS monitoring, etc. It provides real-time visibility into microservice-based environments and automatically discovers and monitors microservice workloads running inside containers on Kubernetes. It also provides monolith and mainframe monitoring, database monitoring, application monitoring, and many other services for end-to-end visibility.
Dynatrace

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.
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“Gotchas”

  • Dynatrace’s list pricing is based upon the amount of memory that is in the monitored servers. The quoted pricing assumes 8 GB of RAM per server, which is low by many standards – which means that your actual starting point could be considerably higher.
  • Datadog is actually 17 different products which include 11 different pricing models so it can be hard for you to know in advance how much you are going to pay for what.

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.



About the Author

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.

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