Datadog Server Monitoring Software: Product Overview and Insight

Bottom Line:

Datadog is all about providing organizations with data and insight into how their applications are working (or not). The Datadog service key differentiator is its ability to provide a layered set of data visualizations, helping organizations to correlate root cause and performance issues across multiple sets of disparate metrics.

Server applications including web server, operating system and database application servers are supported by Datadog, as is support for server services running in the cloud.

Datadog’s core strength is in its application monitoring capabilities, with a high-performance Go programming language based software agent. Datadog also has a robust set of integrations, making it easy to instrument just about any type of server (or cloud) application).

Rather than needing multiple tools for both application and infrastructure monitoring, Datadog aims to providing administrators with a single dashboard providing visibility on an entire stack from infrastructure on up. By having a complete view, it’s possible for administrators to get a more complete view of their server and application delivery infrastructure.

Service Description:

Datadog works as a cloud based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that enables server administrators to integrate multiple sets of infrastructure and application metrics.

The integrated view provides the ability for administrators to understand the relationships with different applications and components. Data visualization is a core component of the service, letting users overlay different metrics to gain insight into operational behavior.

Data that is monitored and analyzed in Datadog can come from any number of different source including cloud providers, web servers, operating systems and even other monitoring technologies, such as Nagios.

Features:

Data aggregation:
Metrics and events for over 200 different technologies can be aggregated. Users can then pivot across different data relationships to help identify the root cause of an issue.

Real-time visibility:
Administrators can easily customers dashboards to correlate and graph data, as well as compare different performance metrics.

Collaboration:
Users can annotate event with notes and also collaborate with other team members to troubleshoot issues.

Alerts:
Built-in alerting system can be set for different thresholds and notify team members via multiple tools including Slack and PagerDuty.

Delivery:

Datadog is a cloud service that is delivered on a subscription model. Server software can be instrumented with a Go programming language based software agent.

Support:

Support varies based on the subscription tier. Community forum, online documents and product training videos are available to all users. Pro users get chat and email based support, while enterprise also get phone and onboarding support.

Use Cases:

Any organization looking to understand how an entire workflow is operating from infrastructure on up.

Pricing:

Datadog has multiple tiers of monitoring service with the Infrastructure tier being the most appropriate service for server monitoring. Datadog also has APM (Application Performance Management) and Log Management plan tiers as well.

There are three pricing levels for Infrastructure monitoring:

1. Free: $0 a month, with support for up to 5 hosts and 1 day of metrics retention
2. Pro: $15 per host per month, with 15 months of metric retention
3. Enterprise: $23 a month and includes machine learning-based alerts as well as premium support