Collect Everything

Collect a wealth of already-available data without writing any code. Install the
Datadog Agent everywhere—every server, instance, VM, node, container-
running host—then enable and configure any of the 350+ out-of-the-
box integrations to start the metrics flowing to Datadog’s backend.

Submit custom application metrics by writing a little code. Instrument your own
gauges, counters, timers, and histograms with DogStatsD, or use APM to
trace the execution time of any code path to see how it impacts overall
request-response times. The client libraries send your custom metrics and
trace data to the Datadog Agent, which then ships them off to Datadog.

Some of your stack may be SaaS, not servers. Datadog can poll many of
these services, and the integrations for them are the easiest of all to install-no
Agent required.

Visualize It
As soon as the data is captured, you’ll see it immediately in the Datadog web
application. Use the Metrics Explorer to search for a given metric and watch it
ebb and flow. View and comment on events, such as an application
deployment, as they pour into your Event Stream. Filter for a group of hosts in
the Infrastructure Map. Get an overall picture of how a given service (say,
MySQL) is running via its default dashboard.

Before long, you’ll create custom Screenboards that combine all the graphs,
numbers, events, and service states you care about the most. You can
customize the graphs in whatever way helps you discover problems: skewing
their metric values using other metrics, applying anomaly, outlier,
or forecasts detection, overlaying events onto them, and more.

Monitor It
Once your graphs have exposed the problem areas, set up alerting conditions
on your metrics using Monitors. You receive emails when the alerts fire, or set
up the Slack integration for a dedicated, in-app notifications.

When you’re well aware of an ongoing problem, silence its alerts. When
you’re about to bring a service down for maintenance, schedule a
downtime so you won’t get spammed with alerts. When you can’t define some
alert-worthy condition in terms of a single host, event, metric, or service, then
create a composite monitor instead.
Datadog
Datadog is a monitoring and analytics tool for information technology (IT)
and DevOps teams that can be used to determine performance metrics as
well as event monitoring for infrastructure and cloud services. The software
can monitor services such as servers, databases and tools.

Datadog monitoring software is available for deployment on premise or as a

software as a service (SaaS). Datadog supports Windows, Linux, and Mac
operating systems. Support for cloud service providers
includes AWS, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat OpenShift and Google Cloud
Platform.

Datadog uses a Go-based agent and its backend is made from Apache
Cassandra, PostgreSQL and Kafka. A Rest application program interface
(API) is used to allow Datadog to integrate with numerous services, tools, and
programming languages. Integrations such
as Kubernetes, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Ubuntu and Bitbucket.

The user interface includes customizable dashboards which can show graphs
composed of multiple data sources in real-time. Datadog can also send users
notifications of performance issues on any set metric, such as compute rates.
Users are notified through means such as email, Slack or PagerDuty.

Features

The features that Datadog offers include:

 Provides an IT/DevOps team with a single view of their infrastructure

(including servers, apps, metrics and other services).

 Customizable dashboards.
 Alerts based on critical issues.

 Support for over 250 product integrations.

 Can automatically collect and analyze logs, latency and error rates.

 Allows for access to the API.

 Supports applications written in languages such as Java, Python, PHP, ss,

Go, Node and Ruby.
Alternatives

Alternative monitoring tools to Datadog include solutions such as Science

Logic and Zenoss Service Dynamics.

Science Logic is an IT infrastructure monitoring tool which provides a cloud-

focused monitoring system which can monitor databases and application
performance. Science Logic can also monitor private, public and multi-clouds ,
networks, storage, hardware and hypervisors.

Zenoss Service Dynamics IT monitoring analytics software that can monitor

networks, storage, servers, cloud, databases, or hypervisors. Service
Dynamics is available only on premise ; a SaaS version is offered
through Zenoss as a service (ZaaS). ZaaS offers the same monitoring abilities
as Service Dynamics.