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Splunk Observability Cloud vs. Datadog Comparison

Which is the best APM and observability provider for you?

March 24, 2023

Written by
Louis-Victor Jadavji, Cofounder of Taloflow

Who should you choose and why?

🤔 Slightly consider Splunk over Datadog if

  • You have a large enterprise environment with massive volumes of data but without the added complexity of being a hybrid installation.
  • You have a scaled-up environment with many events, fields, or attributes to your data. Splunk Observability performs slightly better at scale on high cardinality analytics.

🤔 Strongly consider Datadog over Splunk if

  • You want a solution that feels cohesive in its interface and tooling.
  • You are sensitive to cost and want a relatively simpler pricing structure to work with. (Splunk Observability has grown through multiple acquisitions, and pricing is expected to be streamlined). DataDog is much cheaper than Splunk Observability, at about half the cost per host or CPU. On APM directly, DataDog's APM without the Code Profiler starts at $31/host a month and Splunk Observability's is at $55/host per month.
  • You are considered a cloud-native company.
  • You want logging support.

📝Other Notes

  • Neither Splunk Observability Cloud nor Datadog is suitable for complex hybrid or on-premises environments compared to other options like Dynatrace or AppDynamics.
  • Splunk does not offer any logging support and its code profiling support is limited to a shorter list of languages, like Java and C/C++.
  • Splunk does not have metrics support for .NET.
Splunk Observability Cloud

Splunk Observability Cloud

Splunk Observability Cloud provides end-to-end visibility to modern organizations to pinpoint issues quickly and find the root causes. With full-fidelity tracing, it ingests and retains all the trace data to identify anomalies. AI-driven troubleshooting makes it easy to identify, scope, and resolve issues. It provides continuous code profiling that analyses code-level performance in context with trace data and minimal overhead. With Splunk APM, service bottlenecks can be identified and fixed. It also identifies resource optimization opportunities in the environment.
Splunk Observability Cloud

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”

  • While Splunk Observability Cloud offers a bevy of tools that make it competitive with any observability solution, it was built through acquisitions of various scale-ups and startups. As a result, the user experience can feel severely disjointed at times.

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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